electro-catalytic reduction of carbon dioxide on cobalt phthalocyanine/nitrogen-doped ordered mesoporous carbon

Ever-increasing dependence on fossil fuels consumption, has resulted in continuous enhancing the carbon dioxide emissions in recent decades. therefore, in order to protect the life and slow-down the rate of climate change it is necessary to provide solutions to either reduce carbon dioxide emission or explore novel sustainable protocols for conversion of carbon dioxide coming from non-renewable resources to useful and preferentially non-hazardous materials since. however, carbon dioxide with its non-polar linear structure is chemically stable and difficult to reduce. several strategies are exerted to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide. among current methodologies, electro-catalytic co2 reduction is a green and cost-effective method. electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide is usually performed in an aqueous solution in which water provides required protons for electron transfer. however, electrolysis process is always accompanied with the release of hydrogen, which strongly and potentially prevents the reduction of carbon dioxide [1]. the use of catalysts and catalytic reactions are of particular importance to reduce energy consumption and to increase the selectivity in the chemicals as well as electro-chemical processes. to date, a broad spectrum of catalysts has been employed in electro-catalytic co2 reduction with different successes to hopefully obtain more suitable catalytic materials demonstrating more appropriate activities and selectivities. nitrogen-doped ordered mesoporous carbon (n-doped omc) exhibits superior chemical and electrochemical performance as a result of their unique properties derived from the nitrogen lone-pair electrons [2, 3]. these omcs have several attractive features such as high accessible surface area, tunable porous structures, tailorable dopant configurations and chemical and thermal stability. on the other hand, metal phthalocyanines can be elegantly used as the catalysts for co2 reduction reaction (crr). metal phthalocyanines have many advantages including easy synthesis, high chemical stability, adjustable electronic structure, as well as the ability to combine with carbon structures to form the effective catalytic composites [4, 5]. in the current work a composite of copc/n-doped omc was prepared as catalyst to modify electrode surface for co2 reduction. in this direction, n-doped omc was fabricated by the carbonization of ionic liquid (1-methyl-3-phenethyl-1h-imidazolium hydrogen sulfate) and guanine using hard templating with ordered mesoporous silica sba-15. copc was uniformly anchored on the resulting carbon surface to increase current density, reduce overvoltage and cause stability of the electrode. the resulted modified electrode exhibited suitable faradic efficiency in crr.