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Updated: Oct 11, 2025

Synthesis and Performance Characterizations of Transition Metal Single Atom Catalyst for Electrochemical CO2 Reduction
Published on: April 10, 2018
Electrochemical Reduction of CO2 to HCOOH over Copper Catalysts
Weibo Hu1,2,3, Jiejie Li4, Lushan Ma1,2
1Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 201210, China.
Abstract:
Although great progress has been made in the field of electrochemical CO2 reduction reaction (eCO2RR), inducing product selectivity is still difficult. We herein report that a thiocyanate ion (SCN-) switched the product selectivity of copper catalysts for eCO2RR in an H-cell. A cuprous thiocyanate-derived Cu catalyst was found to exhibit excellent HCOOH selectivity (faradaic efficiency = 70-88%) over a wide potential range (-0.66 to -0.95 V vs RHE). Furthermore, it was revealed that the formation of CO and C2H4 over commercial copper electrodes could be dramatically suppressed with the presence of SCN-, switching to HCOOH. Density functional theory calculations disclosed that SCN- made the formation of HCOO* easier than COOH* on Cu (211), facilitating the HCOOH generation. Our results provide a new insight into eCO2RR and will be helpful in the development of cheap electrocatalysts for specific utilization.
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