Proceedings of MATSUS Spring 2024 Conference (MATSUS24)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29363/nanoge.matsus.2024.016
Publication date: 18th December 2023
Energy-intensive thermochemical processes within chemical manufacturing are a major contributor to global CO2 emissions. With the increasing push for sustainability, the scientific community is striving to develop renewable energy-powered electrochemical technologies in lieu of CO2-emitting fossil-fuel-driven methods. However, to fully electrify chemical manufacturing, it is imperative to expand the scope of electrosynthetic technologies, particularly through the innovation of reactions involving nitrogen- and sulfur- based reactants as products from water/CO2 electrolysis do not cover the full scope of industrial needs.
To this end, this talk focuses on my lab’s efforts not only in CO2 conversion in the use of this molecule as a building block. This entails the co-electrolysis of CO2 with additional small molecule reactants (N2, NO3-, SO32-…) in generating products with C-N and C-S bonds like amides, urea, and sulfonates that are important as commodity and fine chemicals in the chemical industry. In particular, I will discuss several new reaction pathways discovered towards several of the above-mentioned products and the application of operando techniques to understand the key C-N/C-S coupling steps in the reaction process.