bardal wrote:Yes, but still, anyway, C moa, you could still give us some figures, for example what we can hope to get from 1 T of dry biomass, or the conditions of this process, hopefully the name of the bacteria, or bacteria concerned, the difficulties you face, etc ... We have all this for the production of biomethane (and for a long time besides), and it is all that differentiates a scientific approach a neophyte approach or a mercantile reverie. If your friend is a doctor of biology, he must know all this, much better than the future sale price of kg of hydrogen (which seems a bit premature) ...
Good evening Bardal,
I can not give everything like that, it takes suspense, create interest, ask questions ...
As explained, we have been working on the subject for three years, but we only really started in April 2017 and a lot of biblio and bioinfo work was necessary to select the bacteria that we wanted to test. In total we tested about fifteen (sorry but I can't say which ones). Our initial objective was to produce alkanes or alkenes but none of them were kind enough to do so. Some, however, have been kind enough to produce methane when they are not supposed to.
We realized last summer that some of them were producing interesting quantities of hydrogen and after having a quick screening of the market, we abandoned the trail of liquid HC to move towards H
2. We completed our tests with inputs from an IAA (seafood cooking waters) and we obtained the same results:
- A production that starts in a few hours;
- 80% of our biogas is produced in less than a week;
- a level of purity in H
2 of 90%.
It sounds simple like that but we work anaerobically, when an experiment works (or not for that matter) it must be repeated to confirm the results. 2 years it may seem a lot but I can assure you that it passed very quickly.
As far as returns are concerned, unfortunately I can't give you anything concrete at the moment either. If we are able to calculate the methanogenic power of an effluent, as far as we are concerned, that does not yet exist. We'll have to do it ourselves. What is likely is that there will be an impact with the composition of the medium depending on the more or less presence of sugars, fatty acids, proteins .... We still have some experiments to carry out. to define "hydrogen power" of inputs.
For the moment, we have mainly worked with rather poor environments which put the bacteria under stress and which force it to work differently than usual and suddenly it produces things that it does not usually produce, in particular l H
2.
What difficulties do we have?
- Improve the performance of the bacteria "H
2": as said above, we put our bacteria in conditions that are not favorable to it and therefore it produces hydrogen but has much lower growth rates than it does in rich environments. Our objective is to adapt it so that it is able to grow as fast as usual while producing the hydrogen that we want.It will also be a question of modifying or even eliminating certain metabolic pathways in order to concentrate on activity on hydrogen production.
- Chemical precursor: As you can see in the picture, in addition to the medium, we give a metabolic precursor to the bacteria in order to boost the production of hydrogen. This precursor is produced chemically and is available on the shelf but for more consistency we want to produce it biologically also from the same waste. We know the microorganisms capable of producing them, they should grow on the inputs that we have selected. We have to make sure now that they are able to produce the quantities we want, in the times we want and that they will be able to get along with our bacteria H
2. that should do it, the examples of co-cultures that we have are rather positive but we must test.
- Change of scale: Currently we are working on a laboratory scale but to go to an industrial scale, it is not enough to increase the size of the bottles. So this also represents work, we will have to identify the growth parameters that are ideal for bacteria, understand what can inhibit them (do we need pre-treatments for example?). Of course start drawing an ideal fermenter. To simplify, go from the liter scale to the 100 liter scale and then go to the m scale
3.
- Inputs: on paper many inputs look alike, but you still have to check the performance of each one, in particular to be able to define the famous "hydrogen power". Between cooking water from seafood, vegetables, pulp mill process water, rendering blood, dairy rejects ... there is a good chance that we have adjustments to be made. It will also be a question of seeing if it is not a question of mixing certain inputs between them to have a better production.
Beyond the technical aspects, our next challenge is above all to succeed in raising our funds because we need to hire 4 people to do all this work and we need to buy fairly expensive equipment. We planned 3 years to do all this.
Suddenly, we therefore reoriented ourselves towards hydrogen since this is what they do best. 
