Remediation of large volumes of industrial effluents is a global challenge. Recently, we demonstrated an acid-base polyester polyurethane (PESPU) foam for adsorption of organic micropollutants from water. The adsorption capacity and wettability of the foam with pollutants is directly related to the thermodynamic work of adhesion and surface energy. However, the foam's complex surface chemistry and physical undulations make characterization by traditional methods, such as contact angle measurements, challenging. Alternatively, inverse gas chromatography (IGC), a gas sorption technique, is capable of characterizing chemically and physically heterogeneous surfaces. Furthermore, the IGC method allows use of multiple solvents at finite dilution to precisely determine the surface energies corresponding to different chemical active sites. Herein, we present the use of IGC to characterize surface energy profiles of heterogeneous acid-base PESPU foams for removal of organic micropollutants from water. Both pristine PESPU and surface-modified PESPU foams were characterized. We injected a series of n-alkanes at finite dilution and applied the Dorris and Gray method to obtain the dispersive energy distribution profile at 30 C and 0% RH. The acid-base contributions were determined by injection of mono-polar probes (dichloromethane, ethylacetate) and applying the Van Oss, Good, and Chaudhry method at the same conditions as dispersive component. The surface modified foam was the most energetically homogeneous, while the pristine PESPU foam had a higher dispersive and acid-base components as well as much broader surface energy distributions than the modified foam. The surface energy profiles were used to optimize the adsorption process for various organic micropollutants to enable scalability of the technology.