The electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide could serve as a carbon neutral source of fuels and chemicals in a sustainable energy economy. Elemental transition metals typically have a large overpotential for carbon dioxide reduction because the adsorption energies of carbon dioxide reduction intermediates tend to scale. Breaking these scaling relations would require selectively stabilizing intermediates. This motivates the exploration of materials beyond metals and metal alloys. Recent theoretical work suggests that ionic compounds could break these scaling relations. We have chosen to explore transition metal doped molybdenum sulfide materials as well as metal phosphides for electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction. We synthesize the materials using a general methodology of physical vapor deposition of thin metal films, followed by vapor-assisted conversion in a tube furnace. The samples are tested using an electrochemical flow cell previously designed by our group for high product detection sensitivity. We characterize the materials before and after electrochemical testing by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) to confirm the catalyst identity and observe changes in composition induced during testing. We will report our findings on the activity of these materials for electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction.

Ionic compounds for electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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