The increased demands for energy coupled with growing emphasis on environmental conservation have turned the attention of people towards renewable energy. Biomass-derived fuels have received great attention in recent years because of high energy content, biodegradability, regeneration. This paper presents a comprehensive review on biofuel production through microbial conversion technologies. Five main clean energy carriers and the microorganism used in the process of biofuel production are discussed, respectively. Biomass-derived fuels will be a vital source of renewable energy with the development of microbial conversion technologies.
Biomass, Microorganism, Biogas, bio-ethanol, Bio-hydrogen, biodiesel, MFC (microbial fuel cell)
© The Author(s) 2013. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License which permits unrestricted use, sharing, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.