A significant breakthrough in electrocatalytic reduction of CO2 to ethylene and ethanol

• 作者: Guoxiong Wang
• 来源期刊: 中国科学:化学（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2020,（8）
• 所属期刊栏目: HIGHLIGHTS
• 页码范围: 1023-1024
• 页数: 2页
• 语种: 英文

摘要

Electrocatalytic CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) has been attracting increasing attention as a promising approach for CO2 conversion and renewable electricity storage [1,2].The production of multicarbon (C2+) chemicals and fuels such as ethylene and ethanol is highly desirable owing to their key importance in chemical industry.From a point of view of fundamental research, understanding the reaction mechanism of such products is also significant since they involve C-C coupling under ambient conditions, which is a major challenge in CO2RR [1,2].Copper is known to be the most efficient catalyst capable of producing hydrocarbons and oxygenates, but it still suffers from insufficient activity, C2+ selectivity and stability in CO2RR.Many efforts have been devoted to accelerating the C-C coupling step via designing catalysts and electrolytes as well as tuning electrochemical reaction microenvironments;however, the yield of C2+ products remains low due to the limited C2+ selectivity at high CO2 conversion rates [1,2].