Microbial Mats and Its Significance in Biofuel Production

Javed, Muhammad Asad; Aly Hassan, Ashraf

doi:10.1007/978-981-19-6810-5_3

Muhammad Asad Javed⁵ &
Ashraf Aly Hassan^5,6

Part of the book series: Clean Energy Production Technologies ((CEPT))

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Abstract

Microbial mats are natural ecosystems rich in biodiversity, usually found in shallow hypersaline water and marine ecosystems. These microbial mats comprise mainly microalgae and cyanobacteria along with other aerobic and anaerobic phototrophs and heterotrophs. These communities are considered the primary producers of biofuels such as hydrogen (H₂) and methane (CH₄), as well as some other greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO₂). The biodiversity in microbial mats makes it capable of fixing some hazardous gases and organic contaminants, i.e., algae and cyanobacteria can produce H₂ and oxygen (O₂) by fixing atmospheric CO₂ and nitrogen (N₂) during the photosynthetic process by suitable electron transfer in photosystem I and II. The H₂ production by microbial mats is catalyzed by hydrogenase and nitrogenase enzymes present in algae and cyanobacteria during biophotolysis. The sulfate-reducing and methanogenic bacteria are able to fix the hazardous hydrogen sulfide (H₂S) gas by maintaining a low concentration of sulfate in the ecosystem resulting in CH₄ production. This chapter highlights the phenomena of biofuel production based on currently available data by using microbial mats, their composition, and structure, along with their metabolic processes that need to be explored to make microbial mats bioenergy production more feasible in the future.

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Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, UAE
Muhammad Asad Javed & Ashraf Aly Hassan
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA
Ashraf Aly Hassan

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Muhammad Asad Javed
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Department of Chemical Engineering and Technology, IIT (BHU) Varanasi, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India
Neha Srivastava
Department of Chemical Engineering and Technology, IIT (BHU) Varanasi, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India
P.K. Mishra

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Javed, M.A., Aly Hassan, A. (2023). Microbial Mats and Its Significance in Biofuel Production. In: Srivastava, N., Mishra, P. (eds) Basic Research Advancement for Algal Biofuels Production. Clean Energy Production Technologies. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-6810-5_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-6810-5_3
Published: 11 February 2023
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