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Updated: Nov 2, 2025

Synthesis and Performance Characterizations of Transition Metal Single Atom Catalyst for Electrochemical CO2 Reduction
Published on: April 10, 2018
Selective electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide to ethanol via a relay catalytic platform
Juan Du1,2, Shaopeng Li1,2, Shulin Liu1,2
1Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, CAS Key Laboratory of Colloid and Interface and Thermodynamics, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100190 P. R. China liuhz@iccas.ac.cn.
Abstract:
Efficient electroreduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) to ethanol is of great importance, but remains a challenge because it involves the transfer of multiple proton-electron pairs and carbon-carbon coupling. Herein, we report a CoO-anchored N-doped carbon material composed of mesoporous carbon (MC) and carbon nanotubes (CNT) as a catalyst for CO2 electroreduction. The faradaic efficiencies of ethanol and current density reached 60.1% and 5.1 mA cm-2, respectively. Moreover, the selectivity for ethanol products was extremely high among the products produced from CO2. A proposed mechanism is discussed in which the MC-CNT/Co catalyst provides a relay catalytic platform, where CoO catalyzes the formation of CO* intermediates which spill over to MC-CNT for carbon-carbon coupling to form ethanol. The high selectivity for ethanol is attributed mainly to the highly selective carbon-carbon coupling active sites on MC-CNT.
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