B. Stein
BioDiamond, Inc.,
United States
Keywords: biochar, plasma, hard carbon, sodium battery
Summary:
While biochar has emerged as an excellent resource and feedstock for low-technology applications such as filters and soil amendments, it’s usage in other critical sectors such as energy storage has been limited by the more stringent material performance requirements and higher production costs. In particular, the emergence of the sodium ion battery (SIB) industry in the West has been constrained by the global dominance of Asian producers for the supply of anodic hard carbons, which rely on slow, cumbersome thermal methods with significant energy and environmental footprints. BioDiamond aims to disrupt this supply chain vulnerability by utilizing locally produced biochar as a carbon feedstock and converting it into high-performance hard carbons via a novel microwave plasma carbonization process which lowers processing times from hours to minutes, reduces energy consumption by over 50%, and completely eliminates chemical wastes. BioDiamond has partnered with universities and biochar producers to help build and test its proof-of-concept plasma system with several forestry-derived biochar samples. Testing methods and experimental results will be reported at the conference, but for the purposes of this abstract, such data will be kept proprietary until IP and reporting requirements are met. Microwave plasma carbonization and post-processing of biochar has the potential to establish a sustainable, domestic supply chain of advanced carbon materials for industrial development and open up entirely new avenues of growth for the biochar industry, enabling the timely global transition to a new circular economy based on regenerative biomass.