Progress toward Commercial Application of Electrochemical Carbon Dioxide Reduction

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity, and our continued sustainable development requires a portfolio of solutions to ultimately reduce the use of fossil fuels and decrease the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Chemistry is central to tackling this issue, and of the pathways to transform carbon dioxide into value-added compounds, single-step electrically driven chemical methods have attracted substantial interest in the last decade. This review places emphasis on the barriers that chemists must overcome to realize this technology and enable commercial use of electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction. We outline design strategies for gas-diffusion electrodes and electrolyzers that follow fundamental principles of catalysis to bridge the gap between catalyst discovery and integrated system engineering. These should address both technical (thermodynamic and kinetic) and practical (infrastructural) hurdles to implementation. We conclude by discussing how these approaches can be improved to help achieve a carbon-neutral economy.