Biochar: a sustainable and an eco-friendly material for energy storage applications

Abstract

In the contemporary world, in order to deal with the existing problems of ecological debilitation and global warming and owing to the dire need to fulfill the rising necessities for sustainable energy, biochar could be a promising solution. Attributable to the astounding features of biochar, including higher capacitance (≤1600 F/g) and surface area (≤340 m2/g), greater energy density (≤26 GJ/Ton), and porosity (≤9 µm), they can be utilized in the energy storage domain. This review presents a comprehensive overview of conventional biochar production techniques encompassing pyrolysis and gasification along with an emphasis on biochar and their applications as efficient materials for sustainable energy storage in the near future. The beneficial characteristics of biochar over other carbonaceous substances (activated carbon, graphene) have been highlighted here. The applications of biochar and their composites for use in zinc-air batteries, thermochemical storage, magnetic concentration cells, lithium-ion batteries, green energy storage systems, and supercapacitors are analytically scrutinized in this review. Furthermore, all the challenges associated with the practical utilization of this methodology, with a road map leading to future prospects that can be implemented in the near future for the scalability of these projects have been emphasized here.