Enhancing CO₂ fixation by synergistic substrate cofeeding

The irrevocable rise of atmospheric CO₂ levels has prompted the development of scalable carbon fixation technologies in recent years. To this end, biological non-photosynthetic methods serve as promising leads since they not only sequester CO₂, but also convert it into a variety of value-added fuels, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals with high specificity. Additionally, as the organisms responsible for fixing CO₂ derive energy from free electrons or electron carriers such as H₂, the process can interface with existing photovoltaics to achieve a high energy efficiency (~8%) that outcompetes photosynthetic systems (<1%). In this thesis, we describe a non-photosynthetic CO₂-fixation approach that sequentially utilizes an acetogenic bacterium and an oleaginous yeast to accomplish the conversion of H₂/CO₂ into lipid-based biodiesel with acetate as the key intermediate.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Liu, Nian,Ph. D.Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Gregory Stephanopoulos.

• Chemical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129014

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/129014