Fundamental understanding of CO₂ electroreduction on all scales relevant to chemical engineering applications.

CO₂ electroreduction is – from both chemistry and chemical engineering perspective – an extremely complex process. The extensive research in the field helped to unveil some of the phenomena happening on the catalyst surface; however, the dynamic environment in the electroreduction reactors results in a broad variety of side-reactions and inter-system correlations that need to be unveiled to better understand electrochemical transformations, improve the selectivity and stability of our catalysts, critical to industrial application.

Long-term stability of materials used in electrochemical reactors is pivotal to its large-scale application. We focus on understanding the long-term performance of copper, the only selective catalyst for the direct conversion of CO₂ to ethylene, ethanol and other two-carbon products. The low price of copper and its wide availability could support large-scale electrochemical manufacturing, yet its low stability remains the key challenge. The degradation of copper cathodes is proportional to the rate of synthesized products, and under the current densities viable for commercial application (~500 – 1000 mA/cm²), a complete degradation occurs on a timescale of hundreds of hours. Our goal is to study the overseen pathways for cathode degradation and develop approaches to selectively covert CO₂ to ethylene during months to years of an uninterrupted operation.