In this study, ceramic membranes were fabricated using commercially available ceramic powder, native Kalporgan's soil and acid-leached native Kalporgan's soil, which were used in MFCs as the membrane, and the performances were compared. The ceramic powder based membrane was applied as an appropriate reference. By leaching the native soil using phosphoric acid, the compounds such as iron, calcium, and magnesium were reduced that is melting during the sintering in a furnace before 900 degrees C and produced liquid phase was placed within SiO2 networks at the membrane structure, which is referred to sintering phenomena. The porosity of 49.58 +/- 0.52% was obtained for the leached membrane while 19.22 +/- 0.50% was achieved for non-leached membrane indicating that the leaching process increased the porosity of the membrane significantly and based on the SEM images it reduced the average size of cavities (3.5-0.08 mu m). The internal resistance was significantly decreased from 977.36 to 52.81 Omega, and the power density increased remarkably 42 times from 0.48 to 20.18 W/m(3), and the maximum current density climbed by 15 times from 102 to 1535 mA/m(2). The results of this study revealed that the fabricated ceramic membrane can be an excellent candidate as proton exchange membrane. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.