Planet population and with it the energetic demand is increasing, therefore there is the necessity of finding alternative fuel as fossil fuels are finishing. Solar light photocatalytic CO2 reduction to valuable chemicals and fuels is increasingly attracting the attention of the scientific community as one of the “greenest” alternatives to fossil fuels and it could also serve to decrease the levels of atmospheric CO2 emissions, mitigating the greenhouse effect problem. Efficiency values reported so far in the literature are far from optimal. Some of the problems to overcome are the limited wavelength response (frequently limited to only 4% of the total solar light energy), photocorrosion and low quantum efficiencies due to inefficient charge separation.
Most of the reported photocatalysts incorporate precious metals and rare elements, which increase the cost and their low abundance would raise the issue of exhausting its reserves in the future. This proposal aims to address these issues by developing an efficient hybrid photocatalytic system made out of non-critical starting materials and chemicals, able to photocatalyse the CO2 reduction to obtain methane (usable as energy source) using as solely source solar light.
This project allowed to obtain a hybrid photocatalyst constructed from three different materials, a light -harvesting system, metal nanoparticles and zeolite as support, that can be subsequently used to obtain energy. The proposed hybrid photocatalyst have successfully been prepared and fully characterised. In the photoassisted CO2 conversion reaction this photocatalyst proved to be efficient for methane evolution, hence achieving the main goal of this project, green energy production.
