Electrochemical conversion of CO2 to long-chain hydrocarbons

Reporting recently in Nature Catalysis, Zhou et al. disclosed a family of nickel oxygenate-derived electrocatalysts that can convert CO₂ to linear and branched C₃ to C₆ hydrocarbons with the combined Faradaic efficiencies of up to 6.5%. The study also revealed the polarized Ni^δ+ associated with Ni–O bonds as the active sites in promoting carbon-carbon bond coupling through mechanistic investigations using advanced characterization tools and computational modeling