ELF4GREEN - Electro-fermentation as advanced tool for targeted bioproduction of green fuels and chemicals

The project ELF4GREEN deals with an advanced bioconversion concept for production of green fuels and chemicals implementing electro-fermentation as a core technology. In future circular economy, Biorefineries will be responsible for the provision of chemicals and fuels based on renewable feedstocks. A pre-requisite is the supply of cost-effective feedstocks for large-scale production on a consistent basis. An obvious way to go is to utilize waste materials. Bio-wastes and residues are cheap and widely available in the EU at present, however, their use requires significant technological innovation, especially to overcome feedstock quality variations. Within ELF4GREEN advanced fermentation concepts are investigated with particularly focus on the use of such waste materials both in form of liquid waste and as well as hardly degradable organic waste fraction (e.g. mixed plastic waste). The core technology to achieve that, is an up-coming high-end fermentation technology – electro-fermentation. This technique relies on electro-active microorganisms which have the unique feature to shuttle electrons across their cell membrane and extracellularly transfer them to or from an electrode submerged into the liquid media. The applied electric current allows to direct and rearrange metabolic cell reactions and consequently to change the generated product pattern. For the treatment of dry and poorly biodegradable materials, e.g. municipal waste, mixed plastic waste or wood residues, this core technology will be combined with gasification and syngas-fermentation. More readily bio-convertible substrates will be treated by acidic fermentation. In both approaches the intermediary metabolites will be up-graded through tailor-made electro-supported fermentation technologies to obtain the final products.