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Designing materials for electrochemical carbon dioxide recycling

Nature Catalysis volume 2, pages 648–658 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

Electrochemical carbon dioxide recycling provides an attractive approach to synthesizing fuels and chemical feedstocks using renewable energy. On the path to deploying this technology, basic and applied scientific hurdles remain. Integrating catalytic design with mechanistic understanding yields scientific insights and progresses the technology towards industrial relevance. Catalysts must be able to generate valuable carbon-based products with better selectivity, lower overpotentials and improved current densities with extended operation. Here, we describe progress and identify mechanistic questions and performance metrics for catalysts that can enable carbon-neutral renewable energy storage and utilization.

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Fig. 1: Electrochemical CO2 reduction.
Fig. 2: The path from gaseous CO2 to valuable products.
Fig. 3: Example of linear scaling relations.
Fig. 4: Solution dynamics in CO2 reduction.
Fig. 5: Designing materials to activate CO2.
Fig. 6: Motifs on Cu that may influence dimerization.
Fig. 7

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the CIFAR Bio-Inspired Solar Energy program; by the Ontario Research Fund—Research Excellence Program; by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Chemical Sciences, Geosciences, & Biosciences Division, of the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231, FWP No. CH030201; and by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Science and Engineering Division, of the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. M.B.R. gratefully acknowledges support from the CIFAR Bio-Inspired Solar Energy Program. PDL wishes to thank the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada for support in the form of the Canadian Graduate Scholarship – Doctoral award. D.K. acknowledges support from Samsung Scholarship.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Michael B. Ross, Yifan Li & Peidong Yang

  2. Bio-inspired Solar Energy Program, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Michael B. Ross, Phil De Luna, Cao-Thang Dinh, Peidong Yang & Edward H. Sargent

  3. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Phil De Luna

  4. Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Yifan Li & Peidong Yang

  5. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Cao-Thang Dinh & Edward H. Sargent

  6. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Dohyung Kim & Peidong Yang

  7. Chemical Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Peidong Yang

  8. Kavli Energy Nanoscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Peidong Yang

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  1. Michael B. Ross
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Ross, M.B., De Luna, P., Li, Y. et al. Designing materials for electrochemical carbon dioxide recycling. Nat Catal 2, 648–658 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41929-019-0306-7

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