Copper-on-nitride enhances the stable electrosynthesis of multi-carbon products from CO<sub>2</sub>.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 30237471.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-018-06311-0 and PMC identifier 6148248.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Copper-based materials are promising electrocatalysts for CO2 reduction. Prior studies show that the mixture of copper (I) and copper (0) at the catalyst surface enhances multi-carbon products from CO2 reduction; however, the stable presence of copper (I) remains the subject of debate. Here we report a copper on copper (I) composite that stabilizes copper (I) during CO2 reduction through the use of copper nitride as an underlying copper (I) species. We synthesize a copper-on-nitride catalyst that exhibits a Faradaic efficiency of 64 ± 2% for C2+ products. We achieve a 40-fold enhancement in the ratio of C2+ to the competing CH4 compared to the case of pure copper. We further show that the copper-on-nitride catalyst performs stable CO2 reduction over 30 h. Mechanistic studies suggest that the use of copper nitride contributes to reducing the CO dimerization energy barrier-a rate-limiting step in CO2 reduction to multi-carbon products.