Abstract
Selective hydrogenation of CO2 into value-added hydrocarbons, particularly single products, is of great interest. However, this is a challenge because of the simultaneous occurrence of numerous competing elementary reactions. Here a GaZrOx/H-SSZ-13 composite is developed, which shows propane selectivity in hydrocarbons of 79.5%, along with butane selectivity of 9.9% and CO selectivity of 31.8%, at CO2 conversion of 43.4%. Such catalytic performance can be well maintained within 500 h. Incorporation of proper amounts of Ga into ZrO2 promotes methanol formation due to generation of high concentrations of surface oxygen vacancies with moderate CO2 adsorption strength. The large number of strong-acid sites of H-SSZ-13 seriously restricts conversion of generated methanol into aromatics at high H2 pressure, suppressing the aromatics-based cycle and favouring the alkene-based cycle instead. Accordingly, far more propene and butene are obtained than ethene, although they are rapidly hydrogenated to corresponding alkanes on the strong-acid sites of H-SSZ-13.
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Data availability
Data used to plot the figures are provided with the paper and the Supplementary Information, and are also available in the ScienceDB repository at https://doi.org/10.57760/sciencedb.02988 or available from the author upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (grant nos. 2020YFA0210900 and 2018YFB0604802), National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. U1910203, 21991090 and 21991092), the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant no. 837733) and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) (grant no. 2021172). We thank Y. Chen (Institute of Coal Chemistry, CAS) and Y. Su (Taiyuan University of Technology, TYUT) for their kind help with the mechanism analysis.
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S.W. implemented the experiments and theoretical calculations, and completed the original draft. L.Z. and P.W. conducted the isotope-labelled experiment and NMR measurements. W.J. synthesized the zeolite. Z.Q. and M.D. performed part of the catalyst preparation and test. J.W. and U.O. analysed the reaction mechanism. W.F. designed the whole study and revised the paper. All the authors contributed to the discussions on the results.
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Supplementary Figs. 1–60, Tables 1–4, Methods and References.
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Atomic coordinates of the optimized structures.
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Activity.
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Activity.
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In situ DRIFTS.
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In situ DRIFTS and 13C MAS NMR.
Source Data Fig. 5
GC–MS and thermogravimetric analysis.
Source Data Fig. 6
Activity.
Source Data Fig. 7
Reaction kinetics.
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Wang, S., Zhang, L., Wang, P. et al. Highly selective hydrogenation of CO2 to propane over GaZrOx/H-SSZ-13 composite. Nat Catal 5, 1038–1050 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41929-022-00871-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41929-022-00871-7
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