Acidic CO2-to-HCOOH electrolysis with industrial-level current on phase engineered tin sulfide

Haifeng Shen; Huanyu Jin; Haobo Li; Herui Wang; Jingjing Duan; Yan Jiao; Shi-Zhang Qiao

doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38497-3

Acidic CO₂-to-HCOOH electrolysis with industrial-level current on phase engineered tin sulfide

Nat Commun. 2023 May 18;14(1):2843. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-38497-3.

Authors

Haifeng Shen^#¹, Huanyu Jin^#¹, Haobo Li^#¹, Herui Wang², Jingjing Duan², Yan Jiao¹, Shi-Zhang Qiao³

Affiliations

¹ School of Chemical Engineering, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, 5005, Australia.
² School of Energy and Power Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, 210094, Nanjing, China.
³ School of Chemical Engineering, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, 5005, Australia. s.qiao@adelaide.edu.au.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Acidic CO₂-to-HCOOH electrolysis represents a sustainable route for value-added CO₂ transformations. However, competing hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) in acid remains a great challenge for selective CO₂-to-HCOOH production, especially in industrial-level current densities. Main group metal sulfides derived S-doped metals have demonstrated enhanced CO₂-to-HCOOH selectivity in alkaline and neutral media by suppressing HER and tuning CO₂ reduction intermediates. Yet stabilizing these derived sulfur dopants on metal surfaces at large reductive potentials for industrial-level HCOOH production is still challenging in acidic medium. Herein, we report a phase-engineered tin sulfide pre-catalyst (π-SnS) with uniform rhombic dodecahedron structure that can derive metallic Sn catalyst with stabilized sulfur dopants for selective acidic CO₂-to-HCOOH electrolysis at industrial-level current densities. In situ characterizations and theoretical calculations reveal the π-SnS has stronger intrinsic Sn-S binding strength than the conventional phase, facilitating the stabilization of residual sulfur species in the Sn subsurface. These dopants effectively modulate the CO₂RR intermediates coverage in acidic medium by enhancing *OCHO intermediate adsorption and weakening *H binding. As a result, the derived catalyst (Sn(S)-H) demonstrates significantly high Faradaic efficiency (92.15 %) and carbon efficiency (36.43 %) to HCOOH at industrial current densities (up to -1 A cm^-2) in acidic medium.