Electrocatalytic CO 2 reduction offers the ability to store renewable energy in the form of carbon-based fuels. Currently this process suffers from poor activity and selectivity. Unfortunately the advances in electrocatalyst development are hampered by the poor reproducibility of experimental data, even for the most basic of electrocatalysts. Here, some of the possible underlying causes of this poor reproducibility are described and discussed with the intention of providing some insights into experimental procedures and considerations needed for robust experimental investigation of CO 2 reduction.
How selective is Cu for CO 2 reduction ?Cu is widely studied and often considered as the "standard" metal for CO 2 reduction, due to its ability to produce high amounts of many hydrocarbons [3,6,21]. Normally the most common hydrocarbons will be CH 4 and C 2 H 4 , with CO produced at current efficiencies of less than 10% [20,27,31,32]. The formation of CO is expected as both experimental and theoretical investigations suggest that adsorbed CO is the major reaction intermediate [5,33,34], with this supported by the fact that electrochemical CO
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