CO 2 electroreduction to formate powered by renewable energy is an attractive strategy to recycle air-based carbon. At the moment, the electrode materials showing high selectivity for formate at high current density are post transition metals such as In, Sn, Bi, and Pb. Scaling up the CO 2 electroreduction technology to industrial size requires, among other things, cheap and clean methods to produce cathode materials in the form of particles to fabricate the square meters of the electrode surface area needed for the industrial electrolyzers. We show here that it is possible to easily produce catalytic powders based on Sn and Pb via a process known as cathodic disintegration, driving the reaction with electric power and avoiding the use of organic solvents, stabilizers, and reducing agents. The catalysts produced with this method are highly selective for the reduction of CO 2 to formate and show promise for use in industrial electrolyzers. Moreover, the process of cathodic disintegration is quick and clean, it has a high atom efficiency, it uses dilute aqueous electrolytes as solvents, and it has the possibility to be driven by renewable energy.

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Non-surfactant diquaternary ammonium compounds have already been used for obtaining various zeolites in nanocrystalline form. However, facile synthesis of nanocrystals of mordenite (MOR) and Beta (BEA) in this way remains...

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The electrochemical reduction of CO2 to produce sustainable fuels and chemicals has attracted great attention in recent years. It is shown that surface‐modified carbons catalyze the CO2RR. This study reports a strategy to modify the surface of commercially available carbon materials by adding oxygen and nitrogen surface groups without modifying its graphitic structure. Clear differences in CO2RR activity, selectivity and the turnover frequency between the surface‐modified carbons were observed, and these differences were ascribed to the nature of the surface groups chemistry and the point of zero charge (PZC). The results show that nitrogen‐containing surface groups are highly selective towards the formation of CO from the electroreduction of CO2 in comparison with the oxygen‐containing surface groups, and the carbon without surface groups. This demonstrates that the selectivity of carbon for CO2RR can be rationally tuned by simply altering the surface chemistry via surface functionalization.