Researchers have published a comprehensive review showing how a little-known thermal treatment called biomass torrefaction could transform agricultural and forestry waste into high-value carbon materials for energy storage, environmental cleanup, and medicine.
Biomass such as crop residues, wood waste, and municipal organics is one of the most abundant renewable carbon resources on Earth. Yet much of it is burned or discarded, releasing greenhouse gases and wasting potential value. The new review explains how torrefaction, a mild heating process performed at roughly 200 to 300 degrees Celsius in low-oxygen conditions, can convert this waste into a versatile precursor for advanced functional materials.
The process works by removing oxygen-rich components from biomass while reorganizing its structure into more stable carbon networks. These changes improve durability, electrical properties, and surface chemistry, allowing the resulting material to be engineered for specific technological uses.
"Torrefaction is often viewed simply as a pretreatment step," the authors explain, "but it can actually serve as a platform for designing carbon materials with tailored properties."
The review highlights several promising application areas. In energy storage, torrefaction-derived porous carbons can function as electrodes in supercapacitors, where their hierarchical pore structures and conductive carbon networks enable high capacitance and long cycling stability.
In environmental remediation, these materials can act as powerful adsorbents and catalysts for removing pollutants from water and air. Their porous structure helps trap contaminants, while engineered surface chemistry allows them to accelerate chemical reactions that degrade toxic compounds.
The technology also shows potential in biomedical fields. Controlled carbonization can produce carbon quantum dots with tunable fluorescence, which may be used in bioimaging, sensing, or targeted drug delivery systems.
Looking ahead, the authors point to a growing research focus on multifunctional composites, such as magnetic carbon materials that can be easily recovered after water treatment, or conductive inks made from biochar for flexible electronics and 3D-printed devices.
Despite these advances, the review emphasizes that most studies remain at laboratory scale. Scaling up production, improving reactor design, and evaluating economic and environmental impacts will be essential before the technology can be widely deployed.
If these challenges can be overcome, torrefaction could help bridge the gap between abundant biomass resources and the growing demand for sustainable materials in energy, environmental, and biomedical sectors.
"Biomass torrefaction is far more than a simple thermal process," the authors conclude. "It represents a powerful route to transform renewable waste into the advanced carbon materials needed for a more sustainable future."
===
Journal reference: Han W, Wang Y, Wang L, Xie P, Liu T, et al. 2026. A comprehensive review of biomass torrefaction as a versatile platform for the synthesis of functional carbon materials. Sustainable Carbon Materials 2: e007 doi: 10.48130/scm-0026-0002
https://www.maxapress.com/article/doi/10.48130/scm-0026-0002
===
About Sustainable Carbon Materials :
Sustainable Carbon Materials (e-ISSN 3070-3557) is a multidisciplinary platform for communicating advances in fundamental and applied research on carbon-based materials. It is dedicated to serving as an innovative, efficient and professional platform for researchers in the field of carbon materials around the world to deliver findings from this rapidly expanding field of science. It is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that publishes review, original research, invited review, rapid report, perspective, commentary and correspondence papers.
