Biomass

Biography

Biography: Subir Kumar Nandy

Abstract

Demand for animal protein (meat) will increase due to the combined effects of population growth and increasing standards of living in the world. This will lead to stronger demand for traditional major sources of protein used in commercial livestock feeds. The supply of these proteins is limited and cannot be increased without e.g. resulting in land use changes or adding unsustainable pressure to ocean fish stock. Methylococcus capsulatus is a methanotroph that contains 70% protein when grown under aerobic conditions. The high content of protein makes M. capsulatus biomass attractive for use as feed material. Process development efforts have been made, resulting in the use of a U-Loop reactor for continuous production of biomass using M. capsulatus as the main population and three other bacteria in smaller quantities in the culture, utilizing methane from natural gas as the carbon source. In this paper we present the preliminary results of the operation of a pilot plant 100 L U-Loop reactor. All four bacteria are non-GMO, and their use as feed material has been approved (EU Commission Regulation No 575/2011, Section 12.1.2). The environmental virtue of the process lies in the fact that it is able to exploit excess natural gas which will otherwise be vented and/or burned, producing carbon dioxide. Thus, the process paves the way for realizing a circular economy where waste is used to produce a useful material. The application of this process also releases land used for producing feed for other uses, as the same amount of protein can be produced using significantly smaller areas of land.