Presentation Date: Feb 14, 2026
AGSA Abstract
The electrochemical conversion of carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals represents a promising pathway toward sustainable manufacturing and carbon circularity. Despite humanity releasing approximately 37 billion tons of CO₂ annually, the chemical industry requires only 0.45 billion tons of carbon for essential products—revealing a critical opportunity to transform atmospheric CO₂ into industrial feedstocks using renewable electricity. This work systematically addresses fundamental challenges limiting commercial viability of CO₂ electroreduction through integrated investigations of catalyst engineering, reaction mechanism elucidation, electrolyte design, and innovative electrolyzer architecture. Copper-based electrocatalysts modified with phosphorus, tin, and selenium were synthesized and characterized to establish relationships between electronic structure and product selectivity. A unified mechanistic framework reveals that product selectivity diverges from a common acetyl intermediate, where lower positive charge favors elimination pathways to ethylene, moderate charge promotes reduction to ethanol, and higher charge stabilizes addition reactions yielding acetate. Comprehensive electrolyte optimization across pH 1–14 demonstrated that weakly acidic conditions at pH 6 enable exceptional ethylene selectivity of 73% at 300 mA cm⁻² alongside 51% single-pass CO₂ conversion over 400 hours. Cation effects were systematically investigated, showing larger ions suppress hydrogen evolution from 31% to 4% while increasing ethylene production through electric field stabilization. Conventional membrane electrode assemblies suffer from severe product crossover, with >95% of ethanol migrating to the anode where extreme dilution renders recovery economically unfeasible. A novel CO₂ electrolyzer employing dual-membrane architecture was developed, reducing crossover below >1% while achieving product collection at 10 wt% concentration—representing 170-fold improvement. This research establishes comprehensive design principles: tailored copper electronic structure controls selectivity, optimized electrolyte composition maximizes conversion efficiency, and innovative dual-membrane architecture enables economically viable product recovery at industrially relevant concentrations.
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