Continuous electrochemical reduction of CO2 to formate: comparative study of the influence of the electrode configuration with Sn and Bi-based electrocatalysts

Climate change has become one of the most important challenges in the 21st century, and the electroreduction of CO2 to value-added products has gained increasing importance in recent years. In this context, formic acid or formate are interesting products because they could be used as raw materials in several industries as well as promising fuels in fuel cells. Despite the great number of studies published in the field of the electrocatalytic reduction of CO2 to formic acid/formate working with electrocatalysts of different nature and electrode configurations, few of them are focused on the comparison of different electrocatalyst materials and electrode configurations. Therefore, this work aims at presenting a rigorous and comprehensive comparative assessment of different experimental data previously published after many years of research in different working electrode configurations and electrocatalysts in a continuous mode with a single pass of the inputs through the reactor. Thus, the behavior of the CO2 electroreduction to formate is compared operating with Sn and Bi-based materials under Gas Diffusion Electrodes (GDEs) and Catalyst Coated Membrane Electrodes (CCMEs) configurations. Considering the same electrocatalyst, the use of CCMEs improves the performance in terms of formate concentration and energy consumption. Nevertheless, higher formate rates can be achieved with GDEs because they allow operation at higher current densities of up to 300 mA·cm-2. Bi-based-GDEs outperformed Sn-GDEs in all the figures of merit considered. The comparison also highlights that in CCME configuration, the employ of Bi-based-electrodes enhanced the behavior of the process, increasing the formate concentration by 35% and the Faradaic efficiency by 11%.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, through the project CTQ2016-76231-C2-1-R (AEI/FEDER, UE) for financial support.