Recent Advances on CO2 Electrochemical Reduction over Cu-Based Nanocrystals

The electrochemical CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) has recently attracted increasing attention of chemists for converting CO2 to value-added chemicals with the assistance of electrical energy. Over the past decades, substantial efforts have been devoted to CO2RR, however, this process still suffers the challenges of uphill energy barrier, high overpotential, and poor selectivity to target product due to the thermodynamic stability and kinetic inertness of CO2. Among those catalysts, Cu has been widely used for CO2RR to produce hydrocarbons with relatively high efficiency in spite of the poor selectivity to products. Therefore, it is highly desired to developed highly active and selective Cu-based catalysts for CO2RR. This mini-review will summarize the recent advances on CO2RR over Cu-based nanocrystals (NCs) with a special focus on the control of selectivity of product via surface modification. We hope this mini-review will motivate chemists to develop efficient catalysts for CO2RR, and also promote fundamental research on catalyst design in heterogeneous catalysis.