Biological hydrogen production in China: Past, present and future

As a new clean energy source and important material, the use and demand of hydrogen are increasing-rapidly. So that bio-hydrogen producing technology moves toward cutting down the operation costs in recent years. Biohydrogen production capacity improvement and cost reduction are two key points for industrialization of the process. Biohydrogen production has been studied in China for over 20 years in both photosynthetic hydrogen production and fermentative processes fields. The anaerobic process of fermentative hydrogen production has been developing in China since 1990s. The isolation and identification of high efficient bio-hydrogen production anaerobic bacteria is an important foundation of fermentative bio-hydrogen production process by anaerobic digestion of organic wastewater. The paper focuses on: (1) Fermentative biohydrogen production system, (2) Laboratory experiments and pilot scale tests for continued hydrogen production, (3) Fermentation types and their engineering control, (4) isolation, culture media and characterization of anaerobes, (5) Applications of pure bacteria, (6) Fundamental researches including ecology, genetics and improvements, (7) Development of two-phase anaerobic process of H2-producing and methanogenic phases as, and (8) the integrated processes with bioengineering and wastewater treatments. Recently, the first pilot factory has been costructedin Harbin, China by hydrogen production rate of more than 1200m3 /d which located in northeast of China. In photosynthetic hydrogen production filed, study is focused on the fundamentals, engineering application and microbiology. Detailed discussion comes later.