A team of researchers from the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea has developed a process that directly generates 1-butanol from CO₂ via the electrochemical reduction reaction (CO₂RR) with the help of copper phosphide (CuP₂) without first undergoing CO dimerization. A paper on their work is published in the journal ACS Energy Letters.

Source: Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology

We are trying to develop a Cu-based electrode for electrochemical conversion of CO₂ that avoids *CO dimerization and can help us increase the selectivity of the product so that additional power consumption from separation processes can be avoided.

—Minjun Choi, first author

Even though numerous copper-based electrocatalysts exist today, this is among the first instances in which CuP₂ has been used to develop an electrocatalyst that is highly product-selective. It induces a C-C coupling reaction and circumvents the formation of CO, which is known to be a critical intermediate for Cu-based systems.

The researchers confirmed this by using surface-enhanced infrared absorption spectroscopy to show that their CuP₂ electrocatalyst yielded the desired product, 1-butanol, with a Faradaic efficiency of 3.868%.

Our goal is to design new electrodes that are stackable, that can increase production rates, and that can promote conversion efficiency so that we can make our goal of converting and using CO₂ as a fuel in reality.

—Professor Jaeyoung Lee

Resources

• Minjun Choi, Sungyool Bong, Jin Won Kim, and Jaeyoung Lee (2021) “Formation of 1-Butanol from CO₂ without *CO Dimerization on a Phosphorus-Rich Copper Cathode” ACS Energy Letters 6 (6), 2090-2095 doi: 10.1021/acsenergylett.1c00723