Sulfur-engineered rhenium single-atoms on borides for tunable syngas and lactic acid co-production.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 42265115.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-026-73876-6.
- No licence information is recorded for this record.
- Because redistribution is not established, this page shows the abstract only. Follow the links below for the full text.
Abstract
The simultaneous and selective production of syngas and value-added chemicals from biomass-derived feedstocks is fundamentally restricted by sluggish multi-electron-proton transfer and the lack of precisely defined active sites capable of stabilizing reactive intermediates. Here, we report a sulfur-mediated coordination reconstruction strategy that transforms metastable rhenium species on two-dimensional chromium boride into uniformly dispersed Re-S<sub>4</sub> single atoms. The electronic environment of Re-S<sub>4</sub> optimizes the d-band center, stabilizing the key intermediate glyceraldehyde for selective C-C bond cleavage. In this work, the synergistic combination of atomic-scale engineering and reactant kinetics modulation yields a total syngas rate of 34.08 mmol g<sup>-1</sup> h<sup>-1</sup> with a wide-ranging tunable H<sub>2</sub>/CO ratio (0.1 to 14.4), alongside a lactic acid yield of 90.8%. The system's robustness is further validated via large-scale outdoor sunlight-tracking tests, demonstrating its potential as a scalable, sustainable biorefinery technology for the concurrent production of gas-phase fuels and liquid-phase platform chemicals.