Hydrogenation of carbon dioxide (CO2) to formate is an attractive approach for the utilization of this greenhouse gas. However, Non-precious metal-based catalysts for CO2 hydrogenation to formate suffer from either low activity or low stability. It's still a challenge to develop low-cost and high-performance catalysts.
Recently, a research group led by Prof. DENG Dehui from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has developed an edge-rich molybdenum disulfide (ER-MoS2) catalyst for CO2 hydrogenation to formate with superior activity and high stability.
The study was published in Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. on July 20.
In this study, the ER-MoS2 with abundant edges delivered a high turnover frequency of 780.7 h-1 with formate selectivity of over 99% at 200 °C, and exhibited good stability.
The researchers revealed that sulfur vacancies at MoS2 edges were the active sites and the selective production of formate was enabled via a new water-mediated hydrogenation mechanism, in which surface OH* and H* species from H2O dissociation on the edge-sulfur vacancies served as moderate hydrogenating agents with residual O* reduced by H2.
"This work opens new avenue for developing low-cost non-noble metal catalysts for the hydrogenation of CO2 to formate," said Prof. DENG. "The water-mediated reaction mechanism also provides insights for designing MoS2-based catalysts for selective hydrogenation reactions."
