Coal, wood, and coconut shell are the most extensively used carbonaceous materials precursors for the production of activated carbons on industrial scale, although they are expensive and are often imported thus it is important to find cheap feed stocks for the activated carbon preparation and its several application in industry.

The agricultural wastes pose a disposal problem and affecting the country’s very limited water resources (Aljundi and Jarrah 2008). Thus wastes obtained from

based catalyst

Boron group based

Heterogeneous catalyst

Fig. 15.1 Classification of catalyst (Chouhan and Sarma 2011, with permission) agricultural sector are considered to be very important feedstock because of two important facts: they are low-cost materials and are renewable source of energy (Stavropoulos and Zabaniotou 2005) . Both conventional (from agriculture and wood industry) and non-conventional (from municipal and industrial activities) wastes can be used to prepare AC. Table 15.2 clearly depicted the activated carbons preparation using agricultural wastes as raw material, physical or chemical activa­tion can be used to prepare high surface areas activated carbon catalyst (Diasa et al.

2007) . Catalysts can be generally classified based on several studies and research into homogeneous, heterogeneous, and biocatalysts (Chouhan and Sarma 2011) and their sub classification can be represented in the Fig. 15.1.