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Constraining CO coverage on copper promotes high-efficiency ethylene electroproduction

Nature Catalysis volume 2, pages 1124–1131 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

The availability of inexpensive industrial CO gas streams motivates efficient electrocatalytic upgrading of CO to higher-value feedstocks such as ethylene. However, the electrosynthesis of ethylene by the CO reduction reaction (CORR) has suffered from low selectivity and energy efficiency. Here we find that the recent strategy of increasing performance through use of highly alkaline electrolyte—which is very effective in CO2RR—fails in CORR and drives the reaction to acetate. We then observe that ethylene selectivity increases when we constrain (decrease) CO availability. Using density functional theory, we show how CO coverage on copper influences the reaction pathways of ethylene versus oxygenate: lower CO coverage stabilizes the ethylene-relevant intermediates whereas higher CO coverage favours oxygenate formation. We then control local CO availability experimentally by tuning the CO concentration and reaction rate; we achieve ethylene Faradaic efficiencies of 72% and a partial current density of >800 mA cm−2. The overall system provides a half-cell energy efficiency of 44% for ethylene production.

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Fig. 1: The influence of the KOH concentration on CO reduction.
Fig. 2: DFT calculation results on effects of *CO coverage.
Fig. 3: Characterization of the copper electrocatalysts.
Fig. 4: The performance of the CORR as a function of CO coverage.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported financially by the Ontario Research Fund: Research Excellence programme, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the CIFAR Bio-inspired Solar Energy programme and the University of Toronto Connaught grant. This research used synchrotron resources of the APS, an Office of Science user facility that is operated for the US Department of Energy Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory and was supported by the US Department of Energy under contract no. DE-AC02-06CH11357, as well as the Canadian Light Source and its funding partners. This research also used infrastructure provided by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Research Fund. The authors thank T.P. Wu, Y.Z. Finfrock and L. Ma for technical support at the 9BM beamline of APS. D.S. acknowledges the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council E.W.R Steacie Memorial Fellowship. J.L. acknowledges the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships programme. C.M.G. acknowledges the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowships programme. All of the DFT computations were performed on the IBM BlueGene/Q supercomputer with support from the Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform and Niagara supercomputer at the SciNet HPC Consortium. The Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform is funded by the Federal Economic Development Agency of Southern Ontario, the Province of Ontario, IBM Canada Ltd., Ontario Centres of Excellence, Mitacs and 15 Ontario academic member institutions. SciNet is funded by: the Canada Foundation for Innovation; the Government of Ontario; Ontario Research Fund - Research Excellence; and the University of Toronto.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Jun Li, Ziyun Wang and Christopher McCallum

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Jun Li, Christopher McCallum, Yi Xu, Christine M. Gabardo & David Sinton

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

    Jun Li, Ziyun Wang, Fengwang Li, Yuhang Wang, Cao-Thang Dinh, Tao-Tao Zhuang & Edward H. Sargent

  3. X-ray Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL, USA

    Liang Wang & Yang Ren

  4. Hitachi High Technologies America, Clarksburg, MD, USA

    Jane Y. Howe

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Contributions

E.H.S and D.S. supervised the project. J.L. designed and carried out all the experiments. Z.Y.W. performed the DFT simulation. C.M. simulated the diffusion-reaction. J.Y.H. conducted the SEM characterization. F.W.L., L.W., and Y.R. assisted the operando XRD measurements and data analysis. Y.X., Y.H.W., C.M.G., C.T.D. and T.T.Z. contributed in data analysis and manuscript polishing. All authors discussed the results and assisted during manuscript preparation.

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Correspondence to Edward H. Sargent or David Sinton.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–34, Table 1, Notes 1–3 and references

Supplementary Data 1

Cartesian coordinates of the optimized computational models

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Li, J., Wang, Z., McCallum, C. et al. Constraining CO coverage on copper promotes high-efficiency ethylene electroproduction. Nat Catal 2, 1124–1131 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41929-019-0380-x

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