An Evaluative Report of Fermentative Hydrogen Production: Current Prospective and Way Forward

Hydrogen, the most abundant and lightest element in the universe with high conversion efficiency, recyclability and non-polluting nature illustrate its enormous potential as a future energy. Dark fermentative hydrogen production is an attractive route to the renewable production of hydrogen for its inherent advantages over other routes. At least in its initial employment, dark fermentation would use readily available waste streams as a substrate. Various microorganisms are explored for producing hydrogen by exploiting the variety of biological organic substrates. The metabolic pathways involved are well understood and are reviewed here. A large amount of research has focused on factors affecting of dark fermentation process and hence, the main factors influencing the fermentative hydrogen production and the advances in the research of the effect were briefly introduced and discussed. Furthermore, different strategies to extract more hydrogen or energy have been proposed, followed by review of current progress in this direction.