Massive CO2 emission from global consumption of fossil fuels has become an essential environmental concern associated with global warming, sea-level increase, and other ecological problems. In addition to mitigating the CO2 emission by reducing the burning of fossil fuels, electrochemical reduction of CO2 to energy rich fuels using intermittent renewable energy (solar and wind) represents not only an attractive approach of CO2 sequestration but also a strategy of carbon neutral energy cycle. Electrocatalytic CO2 reduction represents a highly promising approach to efficiently convert CO2 to more reduced products such CO, methanol, and methane, which can directly be coupled to the storage of renewable electricity from solar and wind energy. Molecular electrocatalysts are highly attractive because their structural tunability to improve catalytic efficiency and advantages of mechanistic studies using a variety of spectroscopic tools. In this presentation, we will present a versatile polydendate ligand platform to support Ni and Fe molecular electrocatalysts for the reduction of CO2 at up to 100% faraday efficiency to CO and CH4 without H2 formation.

Developing well-defined base metal molecular electrocatalysts for CO2 valorization

256th National Meeting (2018)

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