“…Co9S8 formation can be minimized by application of a chelating agent, such as citric acid, to the impregnation solution, which has been reported to stabilize Co and Mo precursors at the catalyst surface and facilitate a high degree of promotion of Co in the resulting MoS2 structure[56,90,96].The catalytic activity repeatability test (see section 3.3.1 andFigure 6) might thus be improved by altering the catalyst preparation procedure.For NiMo, the EXAFS results obtained at the Ni K-edge indicated the presence of a NiMoS phase.The Ni-S CN of 3.60 with bond length 2.22 Å is similar to the results obtained by Rochet et al[97] for a sulfided NiMo/Al2O3 catalyst, which was prepared with approximately the same metal loading per nm 2 available support surface area as for this work. The Ni K-edge XANES spectrum for the sulfided catalyst (see supplementary information,Figure S.4), showed similar features as the NiMoS XANES spectrum reported in literature[98]. Furthermore, a small bump at ≈ 8352 eV corresponded to the white line characteristics of NiAl2O4 indicating some interaction of Ni with the MgAl2O4 support.…”