Qingdao Energy Institute realizes high-efficiency electrocatalytic reduction of CO2 to produce CO

During the 75th United Nations General Assembly, China proposed that carbon dioxide emissions should reach a peak before 2030, and strive to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060
.
In the context of "carbon peak" and "carbon neutrality", the use of wind power, solar power and other renewable energy to drive electrocatalytic CO2 to generate economically valuable carbon monoxide, ethanol and other fuel chemicals has important research value
.
At present, a series of progress has been made on key scientific issues such as improving product selectivity, reducing catalytic potential, and increasing catalytic reaction current density, but the current density of CO2 electrocatalytic reduction reaction is still small, which cannot meet the requirements of industrial applications
.
To this end, the environmentally friendly catalytic process research group led by Liu Licheng, a researcher at the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Processes, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has carried out a lot of research work and achieved a series of research results (Adv.
Energy Mater.
, 2020, 10, 1903664; Appl.
Catal.
B-Environ.
, 2020, 279, 119383; Small, 2019, 15, 1903668; Angew.
Chem.
Int.
Ed.
, 2018, 57, 12790, etc.
)
.
Recently, the research group originally proposed the amination modification of the carbon support of transition metal single-atom catalysts to control the electronic structure of the catalyst, and developed a universal amination modification method, which can effectively improve The intrinsic current density of Ni, Fe, Zn and other single-atom catalysts electrocatalyzing CO2 to CO
.
On this basis, the flow reactor equipped with gas diffusion electrodes was further optimized to achieve industrial application-level reaction current density
.
The aminated nickel single-atom catalyst can achieve an active current density of more than 400 mA/cm2 at an overpotential of 0.
89 V, and can maintain a current efficiency close to 90%
.
In addition, in-depth mechanism studies revealed that the amination modification enhances the adsorption capacity of the catalyst for CO2 molecules and the intermediate COOH*, and the charge transfer between the metal single atom of the active center and the carbon carrier amino group is the main reason for the enhanced intrinsic catalytic activity.

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Related research results were published in Energy & Environmental Science.
Dr.
Zhipeng Chen from Qingdao Energy Institute was the first author of the paper, and researcher Liu Li became the only corresponding author of the paper
.
The research work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Special Research Assistant Funding Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Cooperation Fund of the Institute of Clean Energy Innovation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
.