Publication date: 28th August 2024
Solar fuels are expected to play a major role for the decarbonisation of the industrial and energy sectors. The European Green Deal identifies electrolytic green hydrogen powered by renewable energy (zero emissions) as a cornerstone for the energy transition. The latter is technologically feasible, but limited due to high production costs. Optimistic forecasts do not envision competitive green hydrogen prices for the next decades. Alternative strategies towards low-cost solar fuels would be welcome, and many scientific efforts are devoted to this task. It is still unclear if the most obvious electrolyzer+renewable electricity (EL+PV) tandem can be surpassed in technoeconomic terms by more simple, compact, and well-integrated photo-electrocatalytic or photocatalytic devices. However, the role of co-catalysts will be essential and crucial to reach their respective goals. The challenge becomes even more complex when the expected technologies will require high selectivity in, for example, a CO2 reduction cycle to yield the desired products.
Regardless of the preferred architecture, or the desired final product, the production of renewable fuels will require electrons and protons, which must be extracted from a substrate, via oxidation. Thus, oxidation catalysis will remain a major limiting factor for the realization of solar fuels. This has been well understood in the case of water electrolysis, where the oxidation catalysts have been designed to offer low energy losses and fast kinetics, being adapted to the optimum reaction conditions imposed by the cathode. But the simple hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) cannot compare to C- or N- based fuels in complexity and in limitations imposed by operation conditions. In this talk, we will discuss some oxidation catalysts for the realization of solar fuels developed in our labs, and their application into scalable, and efficient photoelectrocatalytic architectures [1].
We acknowledge the support of the European Union through the H2020-FETPROACT Project Number 732840 titled ‘‘An Artificial Leaf: a photo-electro-catalytic cell from earth-abundant materials for sustainable solar production of CO2-based chemicals and fuels (A-LEAF)’’
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