FROM COAL ASH TO CLEAN ENERGY: BITRI RESEARCH TEAM UNVEILS B-CIRC, A CIRCULAR ENERGY INNOVATION TRANSFORMING WASTE INTO HIGH-VALUE TECHNOLOGIES

The BITRI team led by Dr Isaac Beas proposed establishing a clean energy startup called B-CIRC to turn waste coal ash into four different energy devices. Coal power plants in Botswana produce tonnes of ash, a grey, powdery waste that piles up and pollutes the land. What people see as problem, was deemed as an opportunity to turn waste into high value products. B-CIRC will turn coal ash into four different energy devices, a high-speed energy storage unit (supercapacitor), two types of rechargeable batteries, and a solar cell that produces clean hydrogen fuel from water. All four will be built from materials found right here in Botswana, with no cobalt and no lithium, the rare, expensive, and often unethically mined minerals that most batteries in the world depend on. The secret lies in carbon.

The research team has developed a way to extract six different forms of carbon from coal and use them as the building blocks for all four devices. This means one waste stream feeds an entire family of clean energy products. What makes B-CIRC different from other battery companies is that the entire process is circular: we start with a waste product, use local materials throughout, and design every device to be recyclable at the end of its life. Nothing is imported. Nothing is wasted.

The project will use cutting-edge computer methods, including early-stage quantum computing, to speed up the discovery of better materials, reducing years of laboratory trial-and-error to months. The goal is to build Africa’s first home-grown, critical-mineral-free energy storage industry keeping the economic value of Botswana’s natural resources on the continent, creating local jobs, and giving the world a cleaner model for how batteries can be made.