Nanoporous materials can be classified into three categories according to their pore size: microporous (or metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) in this study) (< 2 nm), mesoporous (2 – 50 nm), and macroporous (> 50 nm). These nanoporous materials exhibit high surface areas, controllable morphology (nanoparticle and thin films), and tunable surface functionalities (amino group, thiol group, carboxylic group; therefore, they have been showing great potential in many chemical engineering fields. In this talk, I will focus on the water-based synthesis of microporous MOF materials for chemical engineering applications including membrane separation, biomass conversion, and capacitive deionization (CDI). For membrane separation, despite much progress in the development of mixed matrix membranes (MMMs) for many advanced applications, there is still a challenge to synthesize MMMs without particle agglomeration or phase separation at high loadings of nano-fillers. For biomass conversion, we have synthesized a new metal-free and nitrogen-containing nanoporous carbon with controllable amounts of nitrogen configuration through a simple pyrolysis of ZIF-8 nanoparticles. Unlike conventional nitrogen-doped carbon materials with low nitrogen-loading density, the ZIF-8 derived nanoporous nitrogen-doped carbon (NNC) enhances the loading amount of nitrogen, especially for the formation of graphitic nitrogen (N-Q) after calcination at 900C. For CDI application, we describe an approach to assemble hierarchically-ordered 3D arrangements of curved graphenic nanofragments for energy storage devices.