Accelerating electrochemical CO2 reduction to multi-carbon products via asymmetric intermediate binding at confined nanointerfaces

Abstract Electrochemical CO 2 reduction (CO 2 R) to ethylene and ethanol enables the long-term storage of renewable electricity in valuable multi-carbon (C 2+ ) chemicals. However, carbon–carbon (C–C) coupling, the rate-determining step in CO 2 R to C 2+ conversion, has low efficiency and poor stability, especially in acid conditions. Here we find that, through alloying strategies, neighbouring binary sites enable asymmetric CO binding energies to promote CO 2 -to-C 2+ electroreduction beyond the scaling-relation-determined activity limits on single-metal surfaces. We fabricate experimentally a series of Zn incorporated Cu catalysts that show increased asymmetric CO* binding and surface CO* coverage for fast…