Abstract
Reducing CO2 to long‐chain carbon products is attractive considering such products are typically more valuable than shorter ones. However, the best electrocatalyst for making such products from CO2, copper, lacks selectivity. By studying alternate C2+ producing catalysts we can increase our mechanistic understanding, which is beneficial for improving catalyst performance. Therefore, we investigate CO reduction on silver, as density functional theory (DFT) results predict it to be good at forming ethanol. To address the current disagreement between DFT and experimental results (ethanol vs. no ethanol), we investigated CO reduction at higher surface coverage (by increasing pressure) to ascertain if desorption effects can explain the discrepancy. In terms of product trends, our results agree with the DFT‐proposed acetaldehyde‐like intermediate, yielding ethanol and propanol as C2+ products—making the CO2 electrochemistry of silver very similar to that of copper at sufficiently high coverage.
Highlights
Reducing CO2 to long-chain carbon products is attractive considering such products are typically more valuable than shorter ones
As for the currently existing theories on the CÀC coupling mechanism, an in-depth review concerning non-copper systems has recently been published by Zhou and Yeo,[16] whilst comprehensive reviews regarding the mechanism on copper can be found, for example, here[17] and in a review by Fan et al.[18] who compare mechanisms on a per-product basis
Summaries of the main theories for making C2 and C3 products on metallic Cu in aqueous media are provided in the Supporting Information (SI) in Schemes AC2 to I-C2
Summary
Reducing CO2 to long-chain carbon products is attractive considering such products are typically more valuable than shorter ones. Ethylene glycol and n-propanol are observed and found to exhibit a similar pressure dependency as ethanol, providing us with additional insight into carbonÀcarbon bond formation and the mechanistic aspects of C3 production.
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