Recently, a research team led by Prof. HUANG Yanqiang and Prof. ZHANG Tao at Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) collaborated with Prof. LIU Bin from Nanyang Technological University of Singapore reported their findings on developing a single nickel atom catalyst anchored on N-doped graphene with excellent activity for CO₂ electrochemical reduction in Nature Energy.

Electrochemical CO₂ reduction to fuels presents one of the most promising strategies for managing the global carbon balance, which is also the greatest challenges in chemistry due to the lack of efficient and durable electrocatalyst.

"We developed a superior CO₂ electrochemical reduction catalyst, which was single-Ni-atom catalyst (Ni-SAC), it exhibited an unprecedented intrinsic CO₂reduction activity" said Prof. HUANG.

This catalyst could achieve a specific current of 350A per gram of catalyst and turnover frequency (TOF) of 14,800 h^-1 at a mild overpotential of 0.61 V for CO conversion with 97% Faradaic efficiency. It could maintain 98% of its initial activity after 100 h of continuous reaction with CO formation current density as high as 22 mA cm^-2.

This is at least one order of magnitude larger than those of cobalt protoporphyrin and noble metal catalysts in aqueous solution, which previously exhibited the highest TOFs of all reported CO₂ to CO reduction catalysts.

Their findings highlight the importance of single atom catalyst in the process of CO₂ electrochemical reduction.

The research was supported by the National Key Projects for Fundamental Research and Development of China, the Strategic Priority Research Programme of the CAS. (Text by LIU Song)

Electrochemical CO₂ Reduction via Low-Valent Nickel Single Atom Catalyst. (Video by LIU Song)