Amorphous Nanomaterials: Emerging Catalysts for Electrochemical Carbon Dioxide Reduction

In the past decades, the rapid depletion of non-renewable energy sources has caused growing energy crisis and increasing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂), which aggravates global warming and catastrophic climate change. Electrocatalysis is regarded as an effective method for consuming atmospheric CO₂ and simultaneously alleviating the energy problem by converting CO₂ into high value-added chemicals. Amorphous nanomaterials with long-range disordered structures possess abundant highly unsaturated atomic sites and dangling bonds on their surfaces, thus providing a large number of active sites, and show unique electronic structures compared to their crystalline counterparts due to the distinct atomic arrangements. Therefore, amorphous nanomaterials are recently demonstrated as highly efficient catalysts for diverse electrocatalytic reactions, including electrocatalytic CO₂ reduction reaction (CO₂RR). Here the rational synthesis and electrocatalytic performance of newly emerging amorphous nanomaterials will be outlined for electrocatalytic CO₂RR. Importantly, the intrinsic merits of these amorphous catalysts in CO₂RR processes will be summarized and highlighted. Finally, these perspectives on the remaining challenges and some potential future directions in this emerging field will also be provided.