Anaerobic Digestion: Advance Techniques for Enhanced Biomethane/Biogas Production as a Source of Renewable Energy

This is a prime time to develop and implement the “waste to energy” projects across the globe to attain a sustainable environment. Anaerobic digestion (AD) has attracted the scientific community due to its simplicity and easiness to handle, and has the potential to utilize any kind of organic waste to produce a mixture of combustible gases, i.e., biogas and digested slurry, which has further applications in agriculture, solid biofuels, and purification. The process, in turn, reduces the local waste and helps in recycling in a manner that reduces greenhouse gas (GHG) emission, conserves the resources, and establishes a circular economy in the time of undetermined future for the production of energy and safe disposal of the waste. However, the conventional processes encounter with the low biogas yield and long retention time, which discourage the developers. To enhance biogas yield and quality, the momentum of research has increased towards implementation of advanced techniques for development of efficient processes. The present article summarizes the effect of different operational parameters on AD and impact of advanced techniques for enhanced biomethane/biogas. The article further covers the life cycle assessment (LCA) and techno-economic aspect (TCA) of the AD process. This will provide the comparison of different advanced techniques in terms of biomethane/biogas yield. Graphical Abstract