Updated December 1, 2022:
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Non-technical Writing
Development of Bioprocessing for Biological Ammonia Production
High-protein crops such as soybean are known renewable and sustainable sources of proteins. It has become necessary to develop biofuels, biochemical, and fertilizer from bio-resources to reduce petroleum use and establish a bio-economy. ND-crops and bioproducts are abundant in protein and could be a viable source for sustainable biofuel and biochemicals production most especially ammonia. Ammonia is used for many applications like water purification, refrigerant, and in the production of fertilizer, plastics, explosives, dyes, textiles, pesticides and other chemicals. Liquefied ammonia is energy denser and easier to ship compared to hydrogen. About 180 MT/year of ammonia worth $60 billion/year is produced through Haber process. Haber process is energy intensive contributing 2% of world energy usage and 1% of CO2 emission.
In this research, we have developed processing method to produce ammonia from soybeans. Overall, the processing method involve three stages namely extraction, enzymatic breaking and fermentation. Soybean protein was first extracted, broken down into smaller units and then fermented to ammonia. After fermentation of whole soybean in the preliminary work, it was revealed that presence of other molecules like sugar and oil interferes with ammonia production. Hence, the reason to extract protein as the first processing step. The first processing step (protein extraction) was carried out using a sustainable extraction agent (ammonium hydroxide) at conditions (52.5 oC, 10% solid, 0.5% extraction agent and 12 h) that did not damage the extracted protein structure. Also, the larger the size of protein the lower the ammonia production. So, the second step was carried out to reduce the extracted protein size using enzymes. Several enzymes were tested and the amount of ammonia produced varies among the type of enzymes used. The smaller units of protein gave quick ammonia production within 72 h of fermentation unlike the larger sized protein that show equal ammonia production at 168 h.
This research work has developed a fermentation process that operates at near room temperature using natural microbes. This approach will not require huge fossil fuel currently been used by the conventional process for ammonia production.