New electrolyzer design for CO2 reduction
The team at University of Liverpool (Dr Bhavin Siritanaratkul & Prof Alex Cowan), in collaboration with the team at Loughborough University (Dr Preetam Sharma & Prof Eileen Yu), have published a new electrolyzer design for reduction of carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide, a valuable chemical feedstock. The study, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and highlighted in Nature Catalysis, uses a zero-gap configuration with a bipolar membrane, preventing CO2 loss and product crossover which are common problems in other cell configurations. The acidic environment at the bipolar membrane is challenging and leads to low selectivity for metal catalysts, but this was overcome by using acid-tolerant Ni-based molecular catalysts, achieving selective CO2 reduction.