This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is usually discussed as something the world needs to get rid of. Activities such as the burning of fossil fuels for daily use, including electricity and transportation, and industrial applications release significant amounts of CO₂, and the gas enters the atmosphere.
Researchers are now asking whether this road could have a roundabout. What if CO₂, which is at the center of the climate crisis, could be turned into something useful and put back into the industrial cycle? Scientists have been exploring electrochemical reduction because it can be powered by renewable electricity and operates under mild, water-based conditions.
The end products of conversion include useful chemicals. One promising destination is carbon monoxide (CO), an important building block for the chemical industry. The challenge is that CO₂ is a very stable molecule under normal conditions.
Its carbon and oxygen atoms are held together very tightly. Hence, it is crucial to find a catalyst that can coax the stubborn molecule into reacting without demanding large amounts of energy. In an effort in this direction, researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar have proposed two-dimensional materials that could make the conversion from CO₂ to CO easier with exceptionally low energy requirements.
Their findings were published in npj Computational Materials. What makes the study particularly interesting is that the researchers have brought together two strategies that had previously largely been explored separately: MBenes are related to the more widely studied MXenes, nanomaterial sheets that conduct electricity similarly to metals and mix easily with water. MBenes have a boron center that can tune the electron supply to the adjacent metal layer, helping the surface transfer charge into CO₂ and activate the otherwise resistant molecule.
According to Sree Harsha Bharadwaj H, "While previous studies have identified promising MBene catalysts, they generally require an extra electrical boost or generate more complex products such as methane and methanol." The first author of this study, Sree Harsha, is a fourth-year Ph.D. scholar in the Department of Materials Engineering at IITGN. "Hence, we thought about combining the positives of MBenes with those of high-entropy alloys and explored high-entropy MBenes for CO₂ reduction," he continued. As an advantage, the present research focuses on generating CO, a key intermediate for converting captured CO₂ into fuels and industrial chemicals.
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