Sustainable Carbon Materials for Energy Storage Applications

Sustainable carbon materials encompass a growing class of electrode and current‐collector components derived from renewable or waste resources, designed to store electrical energy in batteries, supercapacitors and hybrid devices. Strategies centre on the controlled conversion of biomass, ionic liquids or polymeric precursors into porous carbons with tailored architectures, heteroatom functionalities and graphitic domains. Hierarchical pore networks enhance ion transport and electrolyte accessibility, while heteroatom doping (for example nitrogen or oxygen) introduces redox‐active sites and tunes surface wettability. Mechanochemical, hydrothermal and electrospinning methods offer low‐energy or solvent‐free routes to high‐surface‐area carbons. The resulting materials exhibit competitive specific capacitances, energy and power densities, and long cycle lives. Integration into metal‐free current collectors and flexible separator membranes hints at fully sustainable device assemblies. Collectively, this field contributes to circular‐economy objectives by valorising waste biomass and minimising reliance on critical raw materials, while advancing the performance benchmarks required for grid balancing, electric mobility and portable electronics.

Research from Nature Portfolio

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Sustainable Carbon Materials for Energy Storage Applications publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in sustainable carbon materials for energy storage applications across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Hierarchical pore structure: Multimodal arrangement of micro-, meso- and macropores that facilitates rapid ion transport and high capacity.

Heteroatom doping: Introduction of non-carbon atoms (e.g. N, O) into the carbon lattice to create active sites and modify electronic properties.

Specific surface area: Total exposed surface area per unit mass of material, critical for adsorption and double-layer formation.

Specific capacitance: Charge stored per unit mass of electrode material, expressed in farads per gram (F g⁻¹).

Electric double-layer capacitor (EDLC): Energy storage device in which charge is stored by ion adsorption at the electrode/electrolyte interface.

References

1. Structure Engineering in Biomass-Derived Carbon Materials for Electrochemical Energy Storage. Research (2020).
2. Biomass Juncus Derived Nitrogen-Doped Porous Carbon Materials for Supercapacitor and Oxygen Reduction Reaction. Frontiers in Chemistry (2020).
3. Mechanochemistry-assisted synthesis of hierarchical porous carbons applied as supercapacitors. Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry (2017).
4. Electrospun Carbon Fibers Replace Metals as a Current Collector in Supercapacitors. ACS Applied Energy Materials (2019).