Retained Oxygen Regulation in Oxide-Derived Copper for Promoted CO2 Electroreduction Toward Multicarbon Products

Abstract

Electrochemical CO₂ reduction to multicarbon products provides an attractive route to store intermittent renewable electricity as high value-added chemicals. Oxide-derived Cu (OD-Cu) has been widely investigated for its tunable selectivity toward multicarbon (C₂₊) products; however, it still remains a challenge to understand and regulate the retained oxygen of OD-Cu in the complex reconstruction process. In this work, we investigate thickness determined residual oxygen in OD-Cu, using CuO nanosheets as prototype precatalysts. When the thickness of CuO precatalyst decreased to 1.6 nm, the enhancement of the ability to retain oxygen are achieved, leading to selective C₂₊ production with Faradaic efficiency of around 80% over a wide current density range of 300–700 mA cm⁻² with a peak value of 84.6% at 700 mA cm⁻². Long-time molecular dynamics simulations reveal the enhanced stability of Cu–CuO structure with the layers of removed oxygen increased, favoring *CHO formation and *OC-CHO coupling toward C₂₊ products; structural characterizations and electrochemical results further demonstrate the reconstructed stacked nanosheets with high oxygen retention capacity and easily reoxidized metallic Cu sites. This work underscores the crucial role of the retained oxygen for the OD-Cu performance and provides insights into designing OD-Cu with oxygen retention to enhance C₂₊ products formation.