Thanks to a new catalyst, sunlight has been converted into chemical energy with a

record 13.4% efficiency.

Cheap catalysts turn sunlight

and carbon dioxide into fuel
Scientists have long dreamed of mimicking photosynthesis, by
using the energy in sunlight to knit together hydrocarbon fuels
from carbon dioxide (CO2) and water. Now, a cheap new chemical
catalyst has carried out part of that process with record
efficiency, using electricity from a solar cell to split CO2 into
energy-rich carbon monoxide (CO) and oxygen. The conversion isnt
yet efficient enough to compete with fossil fuels like gasoline. But
it could one day lead to methods for making essentially unlimited
amounts of liquid fuels from sunlight, water, and CO2, the chief
culprit in global warming.

The new work is a very nice result, says John Turner, a renewable
fuels expert at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in
Golden, Colorado.

The transformation begins when CO2 is broken down into oxygen

and CO, the latter of which can be combined with hydrogen to
make a variety of hydrocarbon fuels. Adding four hydrogen atoms,
for example, creates methanol, a liquid fuel that can power cars.
Over the last 2 decades, researchers have discovered a number of
catalysts that enable that first step and split CO2 when the gas is
bubbled up through water in the presence of an electric current.
One of the best studied is a cheap, plentiful mix of copper and
oxygen called copper oxide. The trouble is that the catalyst splits
more water than it does CO2, making molecular hydrogen (H2), a
less energy-rich compound, says Michael Graetzel, a chemist at
the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, whose
group has long studied these CO2-splitting catalysts.

A bright idea

A new catalyst made from copper and tin oxides uses electric
current from a solar cell to split water (H O) and carbon dioxide
2

(CO ), creating energy-rich carbon monoxide (CO) that can be

2

further refined into liquid fuels.

H2OCOCOOHO2CO2CO2H+Catalyst-covered electrodesMembraneSolar
celleeSunlight
V. ALTOUNIAN/SCIENCE

Last year, Marcel Schreier, one of Graetzels graduate students,

was looking into the details of how copper oxide catalysts work.
He put a layer of them on a tin oxidebased electrode, which fed
electrons to a beaker containing water and dissolved CO2. Instead
of splitting mostly waterlike the copper oxide catalystthe new
catalyst generated almost pure CO. It was a discovery made by
serendipity, Graetzel says.

The tin, Graetzel adds, seems to deactivate the catalytic hot spots
that help split the water. As a result, almost all the electric current
went into making the more desirable CO. Armed with the new
 insight, Graetzels team sought to speed up the catalysts work. To
do so, they remade their electrode from copper oxide nanowires,
which have a high surface area for carrying out the CO2-breaking
reaction, and topped them with a single atom-thick layer of tin. As
Graetzels team reports this week in Nature Energy, the strategy
worked, converting 90% of the CO2 molecules into CO, with
hydrogen and other byproducts making up the rest. They also
hooked their setup to a solar cell and showed that a record 13.4%
of the energy in the captured sunlight was converted into the COs
chemical bonds. Thats far better than plants, which store energy
with about 1% efficiency, and even tops recent hybrid
approaches that combine catalysts with microbes to generate fuel.

Nate Lewis, a chemist at the California Institute of Technology in

Pasadena, says the new result comes on the heels of other recent
improvements that use different catalysts to turn CO2 into fuels.
Together, they show were making progress, Lewis says. But he
also cautions that current efforts to turn CO 2 into fuel remain
squarely in the realm of basic research, because they cant
generate fuel at a price anywhere near to that of refining oil.

Still, exploding supplies of renewable electricity now occasionally

generate more power than the grid can handle. So scientists are
looking for a viable way to store the excess electricity. Thats
likely to drive further progress in storing energy in chemical fuels,
Graetzel says.

Posted in:

Chemistry

Technology
DOI: 10.1126/science.aan6935