Empirical Advances turns agri-food waste into carbon materials for supercapacitors and batteries
The Madrid startup makes activated carbon and biographite from agri-food waste. Both materials are validated by CSIC and Energy Une and are being tested by European supercapacitor makers.
Empirical Advances, a science-based startup from the Madrid Science Park, collects agri-food industry waste and converts it into high-value carbon materials for energy storage, cope.es reported on 15 November 2026. The company's work was discussed in the COPE programme "Lo que viene", hosted by José Ángel Cuadrado. cope.es
cope.escope.esOpen source ↗ According to the report, thousands of tonnes of such waste are currently discarded or burned.
Goal and process
CEO and co-founder Paloma Monviedo said the energy transition requires not only producing clean energy but also storing it safely. This calls for materials that Europe largely still imports. The company has two aims: to make these materials in Europe sustainably from local waste, and to bring the technology to industrial scale together with European manufacturers of supercapacitors and batteries.
The process is the company's own and is patented. Monviedo said two families of materials are made with the same process: the waste is "cooked" with water under pressure and temperature, then transformed into the exact structure that a particular storage system needs.
Two material lines
The research was carried out together with CSIC and the Universidad Autónoma. It produced two lines of materials. cope.es
cope.escope.esOpen source ↗
The first, Export, is an activated carbon so porous that one gram has a surface area equivalent to almost ten tennis courts. It is intended for charging and discharging energy in seconds. The second, XGRAF, is a biographite for lithium and sodium batteries, obtained directly from biomass.
Both materials have been validated by CSIC and Energy Une. They are now being tested by supercapacitor manufacturers in Europe. The report gives no performance figures, waste volumes or production dates.
