Green Carbon for Clean Energy: Biomass-Derived Hierarchical Structures in Energy Storage

The rapidly growing population is continuously putting pressure on available resources and production processes, raising two significant global challenges viz. energy crisis and solid-waste management. Both issues are responsible for the major challenge of global environmental deterioration. Different categories of solid waste, especially derived from agricultural and industrial waste, contribute to a large amount of global solid waste production which is not only contaminating the environment, but its improper management is a threat to flora and fauna, including human civilization. It is an essential goal of the circular economy to ensure sustainable development by designing the strategies for waste biomass conversion into functional carbon materials, an essential component of modern nanotechnology-based energy applications. This review article highlights the current trends in different synthetic biomass to functional carbon conversion strategies. The application of biochar-based carbon materials into modern high-performance supercapacitors, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, and air batteries, serves as a catalyst to improve sorption kinetics of chemical solid-state hydrogen storage and ORR/OER/HER electrocatalysts in several energy applications. Finally, the challenges regarding the actualization of biomass to hierarchical carbon technology are mentioned. These challenges should be addressed by researchers as well as policymakers to commercialize biomass-derived functional carbon material for modern sustainable energy storage applications.