Decreasing the anthropogenic carbon emissions is one of the most urgent challenges of our society. Additional EU policies and incentives will be needed to further counter and eventually reverse emissions in the years to come. Capture of CO2 is considered necessary to reach the goal of zero-emission by 2050. The electrocatalytic CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) holds the prospect to mitigate carbon emissions and at the same time convert CO2 with renewable electricity into valuable chemicals for energy storage or as precursor for industry. Depending on the number of electrons transferred in the reaction, a variety of oxygenates and hydrocarbons can be obtained with already high selectivity demonstrated for C1 and C2 products. However, for the CO2RR to molecules with three or more carbon atoms (C3+) such as n-propanol, the fundamental knowledge and key-strategies to yield these economically attractive high-energy-density products are still lacking.
In this context, NANOconfine aimed to contribute to the fundamental understanding of the electrocatalytic CO2RR and helped to develop key-strategies to yield these economically attractive chemical products. The project combines imec’s profound expertise on fabrication of nanopatterns and nanomaterials with the know-how on electrochemistry and electrocatalysis. The project goal was to investigate the effect of near-neighbors in nano-patterned co-catalyst systems (e.g. Cu and Ag) with additional confinement for optimal interchange of their reaction intermediates so that they can undergo coupling to higher carbon products. In order to design the optimal electrocatalyst architecture, a systematic approach was proposed to study the following effects on the CO2RR mechanism and product formation: (1) the near neighbor effect of nano-patterned co-catalysts, (2) the confinement of reaction intermediates in regular-arranged vertical SiO2 mesopores (2-10nm) and (3) the confinement and surface chemistry of different mesoporous metal 3D-nanowire networks.
