Development of graphene based photocatalysts for CO2 reduction to C1 chemicals: A brief overview

Abstract

Transformation of CO2, a notorious greenhouse gas, to solar fuels is a promising strategy to alleviate the interlinked issues of global warming, environmental pollution, and climatic changes. Additionally, CO2 conversion to useful chemicals/fuels also possess a great potential to well match the energy demand in a sustainable manner. Hence, such exceptional benefits of harnessing CO2, by capitalizing sunlight, to valuable chemicals/fuels through photocatalysis, as one of the effective approach in the respective domain, have triggered great interest among researchers and scientific community. In this regard, utilization of customary and standard photocatalytic materials, specifically metal oxides like TiO2, are modified to provide enhanced performance, which is usually restricted due to limited intrinsic optical and physicochemical properties. To overcome such a critical issue of limited performance, several strategies like metals and non-metals doping, hetero-junctions, composites and nanostructures formation of photocatalytic materials have been investigated. Recently, with the invention of graphene and its derivatives, graphene based photocatalytic materials have been a topic of great interest, specifically for photocatalysts development and photocatalysis application. Graphene and its derivatives, due to their extraordinary physiochemical and electrical properties like high surface area, stability, anticorrosion capacity, photosensitivity, and excellent conductivity, can overcome constraints faced by traditional photocatalysts. Thus, Graphene based photocatalysts can be a feasible strategy to break new grounds in the field of photocatalytic CO2 reduction (PCCR) to useful chemicals/ fuels, i.e. conversion of sunlight to fuels. Herein, a summarized overview is presented for the latest development in graphene-based photocatalysts, focusing various strategies and researches being investigated in relation to the, utility of graphene and its derivatives for solar fuels generation, particularly C1 chemicals like CO, CH4, CH3OH, and insights to their role in improving efficacy of photocatalysts.