Biodiesel, a clean-burning renewable biofuel is considered as an alternative fuel due to environmental, economic and technical sustainability. Biodiesel is derived from vegetable oils or animal and/or waste fats. This process generates of glycerol as by-product [3]. This compound is utilized as raw material in the pharmaceutical, food, cosmetics and tobacco industries. The surplus of glycerol has motivated the research that transforms glycerol into value-added products thus, making biodiesel environmentally benign with added financial benefits. [1]

Glycerol valorization into valuable products has drawn great attention as a means to make biodiesel production more economically feasible and environmentally friendly. In addition, glycerol oxidation reaction can also serve as an alternative reaction to replace anodic water oxidation reactions, making hydrogen evolution more energy efficient.

The electrochemical glycerol oxidation reaction (GOR) driven by renewable energy is a promising way to produce fine chemicals, where the most valuable products such as glyceraldehyde (GLAD), glyceric acid (GLA), and dihydroxyacetone (DHA) have been made using noble metal catalysis such as Pt and Au. To reduce the operating cost, earth-abundant transition metal-based nanomaterials have been employed as alternative catalysts, given their excellent performance in water splitting and biomass oxidations. [2]

Nickel is particularly attractive as a receptor element due to its low price, abundance and excellent catalyst for small organic molecules oxidation performance in alkaline media, based on the formation of an active redox Ni(OH)2/NiOOH couple. [3]

In general, the EGOR tends to exhibit significantly lower current densities in neutral and acidic electrolytes compared to those in alkaline media, which is ascribed to the formation of deprotonated alkoxides as the actual active species. [4] Even though, glycerol electrooxidation reaction (GEOR) has been widely studied using nickel as catalyst, there are some major drawbacks regarding the stability of the most valuable glycerol products in alkaline media and its selectivity considering all the possible products that can be made using this material. [5]

Studying different experimental conditions and parameters such glycerol concentration, pH, voltages and cell configuration, the scope of this work is to obtain a high electrocatalytic activity and stability towards the most valuable glycerol electro-oxidation products such as dihydroxyacetone, glyceraldehyde, glyceric acid, among others. In the same way is expected to explore the insights of the glycerol mechanism and the quantification of its products using chromatographic and spectroscopic techniques available in the laboratory.