The chemical industry today relies on fossil fuels as its major feedstock and applies a range of energy-intense thermal and/or catalytic processes to convert this feed into different bulk chemicals. Many of these processes are responsible for a sizeable fraction of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions that are contributing to global warming and associated issues such as climate change, rising sea levels, and more erratic weather patterns. One alternative, the use of CO2 as the feedstock for the production of bulk chemicals such as CO, ethylene, and ethanol via electrochemical CO2 reduction, has the potential to reform the chemical industry to be close to carbon neutral. Not only does this approach utilize some of the CO2 that otherwise would be emitted into the atmosphere, it also avoids the sizeable CO2 emissions associated with many of the aforementioned energy intense processes that use fossil fuels as the feed. Over the past decade a lot of progress has been made in the identification and development of catalysts that are highly active and selective in the electroreduction of CO2 to intermediates such as CO, ethylene, and ethanol. Techno-economic and life cycle analyses indicate that catalyst performance levels start to be sufficient for technology development. This presentation will explore a key under-researched area of CO2 electrocatalysis: catalyst and electrode durability, specifically the molecular basis of degradation. The performance of many CO2 reduction catalysts to date has only be studied over the period of hours, whereas for application at scale stable performance over thousands of hours will be needed for economic feasibility. This presentation will report on studying catalysts and electrodes for CO and ethylene/ethanol production as a function of time. Specifically we have used a range of methods to detect and characterize changes in electrochemical performance, as well as in catalyst and electrode structure and composition over time (SEM, TEM, EDX, MicroCT, …). Different molecular degradation mechanisms ranging from catalyst and binder degradation/dissolution to drastic changes in electrode morphology are observed depending on test conditions. Insights from these studies can be used to obtain more stable electrodes for CO2 reduction with the eventual goal of achieving less than 10% performance loss over thousand-plus hours of continuous operation. As part of these efforts we also developed (accelerated) durability testing protocols.

Towards durable catalysts and electrodes for carbon dioxide reduction: Understanding and overcoming degradation at the molecular level

Macromolecular Chemistry: The Second Century

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ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Expo

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.