Scaling the mountain

Abstract

Over the coming decades, human society has to transition from being dependent on fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. However, renewable energy sources bring with them several inherent problems that need to be solved to integrate them into our society. The power supply of renewable energy sources is intermittent and does not match the global energy demand, necessitating the need for energy storage to bridge the gap. Additionally, the chemical industry relies heavily upon the usage of fossil fuels as chemical feedstocks that cannot be directly replaced by (electrical) renewable energy. Electrochemical CO2 reduction to these synthetic fuels and chemicals provides a promising approach to both these problems. However, finding a suitable catalyst for this electrochemical reaction has proven difficult. So far, among the monometallic transition metals, only copper has been shown to actively reduce CO2 into the desired synthetic fuels and chemicals. Unfortunately, these reactions take place at high overpotentials and unselectively. Alloying different metals together provides an elegant way to find new promising catalyst materials for the electrochemical reduction of CO2 to synthetic fuels and chemicals. This thesis investigates different aspects of bimetallic electrochemical CO2 reduction to synthetic fuels and chemicals....