Selective CO 2 Reduction to Ethylene Over a Wide Potential Window by Copper Nanowires with High Density of Defects.

Electrochemical reduction of CO 2 to ethylene using renewable electricity is an attractive approach for sustainable carbon recycling. In situ generation of defects in catalysts is found to be a promising method to guarantee high ethylene production from CO 2 with high stability. In this study, copper nanowires are prepared in situ with a high density of defects for electrocatalytic CO 2 reduction. These defects effectively improve C-C coupling, thus realizing a remarkable performance toward CO 2 reduction to C 2 products. The obtained copper nanowires showed a high selectivity of ∼79% for C 2 products and >58% for C 2 H 4 . More importantly, a significantly wide potential window of 500 mV was realized for the selective production of C 2 H 4 with FE(C 2 H 4 ) >55%. Finally, in situ Raman spectroscopy revealed that Cu 0 is the real reactive site for the electrocatalytic CO 2 reduction reaction.