World energy demand is expected to increase by up to 40% by 2035.  Over this period the global population is also anticipated to increase by a billion people. The production of low carbon fuels and platform chemicals via gas fermentation is a rapidly maturing technology. This approach uses a microbial catalyst to convert gas streams containing various mixtures of carbon monoxide, hydrogen and carbon dioxide into fuel and chemical products.  Thereby gas fermentation enables access to an array of novel, low cost and globally available feedstocks.<br/> <br/>Feedstocks that can be used by a gas fermentation process either exist as direct by-products of essential industrial processes or are produced through the gasification of agricultural and societal solid waste streams into syngas. To date, this technology has been successfully demonstrated at scale with a diverse range of high volume, low value waste streams. In order to maximize the value that can be added to the array of gas resources that the gas fermentation processes can use, synthetic biology techniques have been applied the organisms used in the process to allow the production of a spectrum of valuable chemicals. Therefore, since selectivity to a product chemical is a function of the genetic composition of the microbial strain used in the fermentation process, and swapping between strains in a single production plant is relatively trivial, gas fermentation offers to potential for the operation of “product flexible” production plants that are able to opt to switch between products according to market dynamics. In this way gas fermentation is a vital bridge in the effort to create value from waste streams and enable the perpetual capture of greenhouse carbon in valuable materials as part of an increasingly circular economic model. <br/> <br/>This paper will give a background to gas fermentation and highlight how this approach offers an efficient route to add much greater value to gas available streams than established technologies, while also fixing carbon and reducing greenhouse emissions.

From waste to wealth: Carbon fixation using gas fermentation

255th National Meeting (2018)

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