A new copper catalysator could innovate carbon dioxide recycling

Researchers at Brown University have found a way to fine-tune a copper catalyst so that complex hydrocarbons - so-called C2-plus products - can be efficiently produced from CO2. In a study published in the journal Nature Communications, the scientists report that the catalyst can produce C2-plus compounds with Faraday efficiency of up to 72%. According to them, this is far better than the previously reported efficiencies of other catalysts for C2-plus reactions. They also report that the manufacturing process can be scaled up to an industrial level with relative ease, giving the new catalyst potential for use in large-scale CO2 recycling efforts. "There have been reports in the literature of all kinds of different copper treatments that can be used to make this C2-plus with a number of different efficiencies," said Tayhas Palmore, an engineering professor who co-authored the paper with PhD student Taehee Kim Has. "What Taehee did was a series of experiments to unravel what each of these reactivity treatment steps actually did to the catalyst, which opened the way for optimizing a catalyst for these multi-carbon compounds. Based on previous studies, Kim experimented with a variety of halogenation methods, as this process, in which a copper surface is coated with chlorine, bromine, or iodine atoms in the presence of an electrical potential, could increase the selectivity of a catalyst for C2-plus products. After many tests, he determined which halogen elements and which electrical potentials give catalysts with the best performance in CO2-to-C2-plus reactions. He found that the optimal preparations could give Faradaic efficiencies between 70.7% and 72.6%, far higher than any other copper catalyst. The researchers say that such a catalyst could ultimately help recycle CO2 on a large scale, for example in mines, power plants, and other industrial facilities, to then convert it into other useful carbon compounds.