Electrochemical Carbon Dioxide Reduction at Nanostructured Gold, Copper, and Alloy Materials

Mitigating carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is one of today's most important scientific challenges. Electrochemical conversion of CO2 into industrially relevant chemicals is a leading strategy because it would allow sustainable production of commodity chemicals. In this review, we outline the current progress in nanostructuring gold, copper, and alloy catalysts for the electrochemical CO2 reduction reaction. In general, Au catalysts show structure and voltage dependent CO selectivity alongside the H-2 evolution reaction. The ability to tune CO to H-2 product distributions is appealing for downstream processing into a variety of industrially relevant chemicals. Cu catalysts produce a wider range of products, and current efforts focus on controlling the product distribution by tuning the catalyst size, structure, oxidation state, and crystallographic orientation. Finally, we discuss the emerging field of computational electrocatalysis with emphasis on the computational hydrogen electrode method. The combination of experiment and computation is important because it provides fundamental insight into chemical processes driving catalytic CO2 conversion. Continued work will help to tune catalyst structure and create next-generation materials with high catalytic activity and desirable product selectivity.