Issue 2, 2016 - USTC develops a new catalyst to convert carbon dioxide into fuel

The research group of Professor Xie Yi and Professor Sun Yongfuren of the Hefei National Laboratory of Microscale Physical Science of the
University of Science and Technology of China recently designed a new electrocatalytic material that can efficiently and "cleanly" convert carbon dioxide into formic acid in liquid fuel, which was published in the journal
Nature on January 7.

Although some CO2 capture technologies have entered the stage of small-scale industrialization, there are also many options for the use of CO2 to produce industrial feedstocks
such as methane, formic acid, formaldehyde, methanol, etc.
However, some of the existing solutions require the use of expensive precious metal catalysts, and some produce a variety of products, which makes subsequent separation difficult
.
Therefore, the scientific community is constantly exploring new and better solutions
.

Sun Yongfu's research team designed and fabricated four atom-thick two-dimensional materials with hybrid cobalt and cobalt oxides as electrocatalysts
.
The researchers showed that cobalt has higher catalytic carbon dioxide activity when it is located in a specific arrangement method and oxidation valence state, that is, the presence of ultra-thin two-dimensional structures and metal oxides improves the ability to
catalyze the reduction of carbon dioxide.