Upgrading agricultural biomass for sustainable energy storage: Bioprocessing, electrochemistry, mechanism

To tackle the ecological crisis with global warming, fossil fuel exhaustion and environmental pollution, “green revolution” was proposed as an integrative upgrading plan to address the sustainability issues related to foods, agriculture, energy and environment. In past decades, technological breakthroughs in rechargeable batteries have shed a light on mobile energy storage for replacing fossil fuel, which further boosted the market of portable electronic devices and electric vehicles. With the rapidly increasing demand for rechargeable batteries, concerns are arising associated with the environmental impacts, life cycles and supply chain sustainability of rechargeable batteries. Recently, numerous research and industrial endeavors have been stimulated to investigate the feasibility of producing anode materials from renewable biomass precursors, especially for lithium ion batteries and sodium ion batteries. Biomass is a renewable organic material, and it is the single largest renewable carbon source generated across the globe. Despite of many promising results have been reported, critical issues remain to be analyzed, in particular for those cross-disciplinary problems. There is still lack of knowledge in regard to the chemistry of biomass major components during thermochemical treatments, properties and yields of carbon materials as a function of processing conditions and precursor components, and mechanisms of carbon materials for energy storage and their corresponding electrochemical profiles. In this review, we provide a critical and in-depth analysis to establish the communication between different scientific disciplines of this topic and to elucidate the interplay between agricultural waste biomass science and materials electrochemistry in batteries.