Biogas production potential of aquatic weeds as the next-generation feedstock for Bioenergy production: A Review

Abstract

Aquatic weeds have exceptionally high reproduction rates, are rich in cellulose and hemicellulose, and contain a negligible amount of lignin, making them an ideal crop for the next generation of biofuels. Previously reported studies proposed that water hyacinth, water lettuce, common duckweeds, and water spinach can be managed or utilized using different advanced techniques, while anaerobic digestion is one of the feasible and cost-effective techniques to manage these biowastes. The present study was carried out to investigate the potential of utilizing four common aquatic weed species (water hyacinth, water lettuce, common duckweeds, and water spinach) as substrates for anaerobic digestion in order to produce biogas. The high reproduction rates, high cellulose and hemicellulose content, coupled with low lignin content, of these aquatic weeds make them ideal candidates for this purpose. The study evaluated the feasibility of anaerobic digestion as a management method for these aquatic weeds, which are often considered invasive and difficult to control. The study provides an overview of the characteristics and management strategies of these aquatic weeds in relation to biogas production, with possible future developments in the field.

Biogas production potential of aquatic weeds as the next-generation feedstock for bioenergy production: a review

“…In this study, a total of 1000 articles with the keywords "weeds biogas," "aquatic weeds biogas," "aquatic weeds anaerobic digestion," "water hyacinth, biogas'', "Pistia Biogas", "duckweed, biogas" and " water spinach, biogas" were searched on the Web of Science. Using VOS viewer software, keywords were evaluated (Koley et al 2022;Basu et al 2021;Show et al 2022). The keyword co-occurrence outcomes were de ned to be 15.…”

“…The maximum biogas production was observed in water hyacinth (552 L kg -1 ), and the methane concentration was 62%. Koley et al (2022) and Mathew et al (2015) also conducted experiments on biogas production from different aquatic weeds and observed the highest biogas production in water hyacinth, i.e. 410 L Kg -1 VS and 552 L kg -1 VS. Apart from these various researches has conducted different experiments on biogas production from water hyacinth where different pretreatment and inoculums have been used for biogas production and enhancement are listed in Table 1.…”

“…The aquatic weeds are capable of producing an adequate amount of biogas which could generate electricity at a low cost and cover the local area. Aquatic weeds proved to be an eminent source for biofuel generation (Koley et al 2022;Mathew et al 2015).…”

“…It is lignocellulosic biomass, which is a mixture of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin (Güngören Madenoğlu et al 2019). The richness of carbohydrates (49.45%), protein (16.47%), crude bre (17.81%) and fat (3.56%) signify that it has a great potential for conversion into biogas (Pantawong et al 2015; Kaur et al 2017; Koley et al 2022). Duckweeds make a thick surface mat that creates a coating in the water surface which limits light penetration, gas-liquid oxygen translation, controlled mosquito, algae and odour and also decreases evaporation from the water surface and wind effects on water (Bonomo et al 1997).…”