Cooperation of Different Active Sites to Promote CO₂ Electroreduction to Multi-carbon Products at Ampere-Level

Electroreduction of CO₂ to C₂₊ products provides a promising strategy for reaching the goal of carbon neutrality. However, achieving high selectivity of C₂₊ products at high current density remains a challenge. In this work, we designed and prepared a multi-sites catalyst, in which Pd was atomically dispersed in Cu (Pd−Cu). It was found that the Pd−Cu catalyst had excellent performance for producing C₂₊ products from CO₂ electroreduction. The Faradaic efficiency (FE) of C₂₊ products could be maintained at approximately 80.8 %, even at a high current density of 0.8 A cm⁻² for at least 20 hours. In addition, the FE of C₂₊ products was above 70 % at 1.4 A cm⁻². Experiments and density functional theory (DFT) calculations revealed that the catalyst had three distinct catalytic sites. These three active sites allowed for efficient conversion of CO₂, water dissociation, and CO conversion, ultimately leading to high yields of C₂₊ products.