only substantial factor in the overall ESR process. Other important factorst hat influence the catalytic activity and selectivity are the morphology and textural properties of the support. [3,13,20] Soykal and co-workersi nvestigated the influence of the particle size (3.5and 120 nm) [3,21] and morphology [11] on the reducibility of ceria and its catalytic performance under the ESR conditions.R egardless of whether ceria wasp re-reduced or not, it converged to the same oxidation state (a mixture of Ce IV and Ce III )a tagiven temperature and exhibited as imilar ESR performance;h owever,ahighly dispersed cerias upport produced much more ethylene than its poorly dispersed counterpart. [3,21] In contrastt ot he studies presented by Soykal et al., [3,21] the results of da Silva et al. [54] and Laosiripojana and Assabumrungrat [20] showed that al ow-surface-area ceria exhibited ah igh selectivity to ethylene, whereas its high-surface-areac ounterpart was selective towards acetaldehyde. [54] However,t he authors agreed [21,54] that the use of nano-sized ceria ensures ah igher ethanol conversion and hydrogen yield. Therefore, any discrepancy between differentr esults, [3,8,13,21] although they concern ESR performed over Co/CeO 2 catalysts, may arise from differences in the morphology and catalytic properties of the ceria support used.Ag reat number of studies focus on the role of Co and on the ceria oxidation state in the ESR reaction, [2,3,7,8,10,11,21,29] whereas only af ew aim to explain the role of surface-adsorbed hydroxyl species, or generally speaking, surface-adsorbed oxygen-containing species. [44,[55][56][57] da Silva et al. [43] suggested that hydroxyl groups adsorbed on the ceria surfacea ssist in coke removal from Co, whereas another group [1] highlighted that ah igh concentration of surface-adsorbed oxygen-containing speciesm ay also induce the oxidation of the metal surface. In the second case, it is clear that adsorbed speciesw ould influence the catalysts electivity and, [48] therefore, play an important role in the ESR. de Lima et al. [55] presented as cheme of the transformation of ethoxy speciesi nw hich dehydrogenated species( acetyl species) undergo support-induced oxidation by the formation of acetates with oxygen-containing species( OH or surfaceo xygen adatoms). Acetate speciesc an be further oxidisedb yt he surface-adsorbed oxygen-containing species to carbonates followed by decomposition to CO 2 .It is generally accepted that promotersi mprove the stability of catalysts. Promoters (e.g.,a lkali metals,s uch as Na [58,59] and K, [22-24, 31, 60-62] and noble metals, such as Rh [7,10,40,63] and Pt) [62,64] are used widely to improvec atalytic activity [24,59] and extend the catalyst lifetime by making sintering [47] and carbon formation [23,24,31,59,60] more difficult. Snoeck et al. [65] examined the effect of the Kl oading on Ni catalysts on the rate of carbon gasification. Their findings showed that the most satisfactory results were obtained with a1 .6-2 wt %K 2 Oc ontent. Ogo et al. [23] sho...