Progress toward Commercial Application of Electrochemical Carbon Dioxide Reduction

Abstract

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity, and our continued sustainable development requires a portfolio of solutions to ultimately reduce the use of fossil fuels and decrease the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Chemistry is central to tackling this issue, and of the pathways to transform carbon dioxide into value-added compounds, single-step electrically driven chemical methods have attracted substantial interest in the last decade. This review places emphasis on the barriers that chemists must overcome to realize this technology and enable commercial use of electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction. We outline design strategies for gas-diffusion electrodes and electrolyzers that follow fundamental principles of catalysis to bridge the gap between catalyst discovery and integrated system engineering. These should address both technical (thermodynamic and kinetic) and practical (infrastructural) hurdles to implementation. We conclude by discussing how these approaches can be improved to help achieve a carbon-neutral economy.

Promises of Main Group Metal–Based Nanostructured Materials for Electrochemical CO2 Reduction to Formate

“…Importantly, electrochemical CO 2 reduction can be coupled with photovoltaic or other renewable energy harvesting devices, and enables the storage of intermittent renewable energy in chemical bonds with high volumetric and gravimetric energy density, thus offering a promising solution toward building a sustainable carbon‐neutral economy ( Figure 1 ). In addition, this technology usually does not require high temperature or high pressure reaction conditions, and is likely to be implemented more quickly on an industrial scale than other competing technologies, such as photocatalytic CO 2 reduction that is also an active ongoing research direction …”

Electrochemical Reduction of CO2: Effect of Convective CO2 Supply in Gas Diffusion Electrodes

“…In this regard, the electrochemical conversion of CO 2 stands out for its ability to reduce CO 2 into value‐added carbon‐based products making use of electrical energy. In particular carbon monoxide (CO) is an interesting product in terms of revenue per mole of electrons since its production takes up only two moles of electrons per mole of CO 2 reduced . Moreover, CO has broad applications in the chemical industry.…”

Rational Design and Construction of Cocatalysts for Semiconductor‐Based Photo‐Electrochemical Oxygen Evolution: A Comprehensive Review

“…Pan et al constructed TiO 2 p-n homojunction to realize enhanced PEC H 2 evolution performance. Virtually, it is revealed that most of the excellent PEC water splitting cocatalysts are electrocatalysts, [18][19][20] such as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), [21][22][23][24][25] phosphorous metal compounds, [26][27][28] metal oxides, [29][30][31][32] metal hydroxides, [29,33] etc. [16] Alternatively, engineering cocatalysts on the surface of photoelectrodes gradually came to sight recently, as the existence of cocatalysts can bring about the reduced overpotential, accelerated reaction kinetics, enriched active sites, and suppressed corrosion.…”