Electrode Engineering for Electrochemical CO₂ Reduction

Abstract

Excessive carbon dioxide emissions cause severe global warming issues. One efficient way to deal with the problem is to convert CO2 into valuable fuels and chemicals. The electrocatalytic carbon dioxide reduction reaction (CO2RR) has an excellent potential to reduce carbon emissions. Over the past few decades, research in this field has focused on creating high-performance catalysts. However, the overall efficiency of the CO2RR process is limited at the device level, such as slow CO2 mass transportation causing insufficient current density output, which is an urgent issue to be overcome in the design of advanced CO2RR electrolyzers. Recently, gas diffusion electrodes have been intensively investigated to raise the CO2RR performance into commercially relevant current densities by boosting the CO2 mass transport rate. This review focuses on recent research progress on electrode engineering for increasing the CO2RR performance, along with electrode-stabilizing strategies for long-term CO2 electrolysis. Future directions are proposed to accelerate the development of advanced electrodes for industrial CO2 electrolyzers.