Biohydrogen, a potential roadmap to sustainable green energy supply and carbon sequestrating in the transport sector by 2060

Abstract

Current research goals lead to achieve zero carbon emission in transportation, agricultural, and forest sector through biohydrogen production by biomass residues. To assess the current development status and forecast future technologies, Traffic emission evaluation model of project (TEEMP) was used. Results show that, in 2024 cumulative CO2 emission by forest and agricultural were 3.5 billion metric tonne (BMt) while from transportation 8.47 BMt. Major assessments indicate that globally about 5–10 Gt/year of biomass residues are technically and economically recoverable, mainly from China, India, the U.S., Russia, and Europe, corresponding to roughly 40–60 EJ/year of bioenergy potential. Instead of burning these wastes in fields, they should be collected, converted into biohydrogen, and used as a fossil fuel replacement to reduce CO2 emissions. So far, biological pre-treatment and dark-photo fermentation are well-known techniques for the production of high-quality biohydrogen due to their controllability and low energy consumption. The experimental findings showed that the collection of agricultural 1840 Mt and forest 927 Mt waste residues can produce 15,460 Kt and 929 Kt of biohydrogen respectively, which will help to achieve to reduce the carbon emission of 85.13 Mt agriculture and 57.75 Mt forest by 2040 respectively. Sustainable biohydrogen production can be achieved by enhancing the production capacity by solving collection, transportation, and management challenges. These challenges can be overcome through the development of policies, implementations, laws, government and organization training, satellite monitoring, and electronic media. Lastly, bottom-up accounting framework scenario reflected the overall possibilities of CO2 emissions reduction from 9.699 BMt to 0.03 BMt by 2010 to 2060 can be reduced from the atmosphere by stopping the open field burning of waste residues and using biohydrogen as an alternative to fossil.