Amorphous CeO<sub>2</sub>–Cu Heterostructure Enhances CO<sub>2</sub> Electroreduction to Multicarbon Alcohols
Tianyi Kou, Shanwen Wang, Shaokang Yang, Qiu Ren, Riley Ball, Dewei Rao, Samuel Chiovoloni, Jennifer Lu, Zhonghua Zhang, Eric B. Duoss, Yat Li
Abstract
Electrochemical conversion of carbon dioxide (CO2) gas to value-added chemicals such as multicarbon (C2+) alcohols is a promising and attractive decarbonization strategy. However, there are tremendous challenges in tuning the intrinsic activity and selectivity of the catalysts to produce C2+ alcohols. In this work, we prepared a CeO2–Cu composite catalyst via a combination of metallurgy and dealloying method. The interfacial sites of amorphous CeO2–Cu heterostructure improve the adsorption of key reaction intermediates *CO and promote the C–C coupling. Significantly, they also stabilize *CH2CHO at the bifurcation step, steering the reaction pathway toward the formation of C2+ alcohols over ethylene. The CeO2–Cu catalyst achieves a remarkable faradaic efficiency of 32.9% ± 2.6% for C2+ alcohols at −0.6 V vs RHE. This work demonstrates an effective strategy of improving the intrinsic activity and selectivity of the Cu-based catalysts for the generation of C2+ alcohols.