Small Molecule Activation on Heterogeneous Catalysts

In recent years, the environmental impact of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions has become a significant societal concern. In that context, the production of a large fraction of chemicals and key intermediates, such as alcohols, olefins, and paraffins, still relies on the catalytic conversion of syngas (CO/H₂) [1], hence their current large CO₂ footprint. Therefore large research efforts are directed at the direct conversion of CO₂ to these value-added chemicals or the production of syngas, using green H₂, with the goal of implementing a circular CO₂ economy (Figure 1) [2].
In that context, our group has been investigating Methane Dry Reforming (DRM) [3] and the hydrogenation of COx, e.g. the Reverse Water-Gas Shift (RWGS), Sabatier Reaction (Methanation), and the synthesis of methanol, higher alcohols and hydrocarbons [4, 5] with the goal to identify new catalyst compositions and to uncover detailed structure-activity relationships, focusing on supported metal nanoparticles. We tackle this challenge using our favorite tools; Surface Organometallic Chemistry, Data-driven High throughput experimentation (HTE, Operando spectroscopy and Computational chemistry.