Recently, Dr. She Xiaojie from Institute for Energy Research of Jiangsu University (JSU) had a research paper titled Challenges and Opportunities of Electrocatalytic CO2 Reduction to Chemicals and Fuels” published online in Angewandte Chemie International Edition (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2022, e202211396; DOI: 10.1002/anie.202211396). JSU is the co-operated institution and Dr. She is the first author.

As the world continues to transition toward a low-carbon energy system, the electrocatalytic CO2 reduction (ECO2R) into chemicals and feedstocks, which could decouple the chemical and fuel productions from fossil fuels and thus close the carbon loop, is considered one of the nearing-commercialization technologies for CO2 emission cuts and carbon neutrality. Despite decades of studies, advances at the laboratory scale in terms of the design of catalysts and insights into underlying ECO2R processes have not yet led to industrial deployment or even demonstration engineering.

Thus, the authors outlined the current ECO2R technology progress, including the electrolytic cell, ion exchange membrane, electrocatalyst, gas diffusion electrodes, and reaction mechanism, as well as potential synergies from the integration with renewables. They accentuated the significance of overall architecture designs of the ECO2R technology for industrial deployment and prospect the roadmap of ECO2R from laboratory scale to industrial application.

In recent years, the Institute for Energy Research focuses on photocatalytic CO2 reduction and electrocatalytic CO2 reduction, etc., and have presided more than 10 scientific research projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and published more than 100 research papers.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/anie.202211396)