Review—Sustainable Biomass-Derived Carbon Materials for Energy Storage Applications

The world is rapidly moving towards growth, and energy has been a noteworthy aspect of achieving growth. Rapid growth has also led to the over-exploitation of the environment to meet energy demands. Natural resources such as coal, petroleum, and natural gas are rapidly depleting to fulfill the energy demands. Using natural resources has also increased pollution; consequently, detrimental climate change is knocking at our door. Many countries are trying to follow the Paris agreement to control the Earth’s rising temperature. One of the ways to achieve this is to utilize renewable resources for energy generation and storage. In this context, biomass waste is a sustainable resource for producing energy storage materials. The intangible outcomes of doing so are effectively recycling the waste and reducing pollution, which is the consequence of the uncontrolled burning of biomass waste. In this review, wide-ranging scrutiny has been done to showcase biomass-derived carbon materials as suitable electrode materials for supercapacitors, fuel for catalytic activity in fuel cells, anode materials for batteries, and excellent supporting material for shape stabilizing the phase change material for thermal heat storage applications.