Artificial upcycling of carbon dioxide (CO₂) into value-added products in a sustainable manner represents an opportunity to tackle environmental issues and realize a circular economy.

However, compared with easily available C1/C2 products, efficient and sustainable synthesis of energy-rich long-chain compounds from CO₂ still remains a huge challenge.

A joint research team led by Prof. Xia Chuan from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Prof. Yu Tao from the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Prof. Zeng Jie from the University of Science and Technology of China, has developed a hybrid electro-biosystem, coupling spatially separate CO₂ electrolysis with yeast fermentation, which efficiently converted CO₂ to glucose.

The results were published in Nature Catalysis on April 28.

The proposed spatially decoupled electro-biosystem includes CO₂ electrolysis and yeast fermentation. It can convert CO₂ to glucose or fatty acids with both high titer and high yield.

“Acetic acid is not only the main component of vinegar, but also one of the excellent biosynthetic carbon sources. It can be transformed into other substances in life, such as glucose. Acetic acid can be obtained by direct electrolysis of CO₂, but with ultra-low efficiency. We thus propose a two-step strategy to convert CO₂ into acetic acid, with CO as the intermediate,” said Prof. Zeng.

Accordingly, the researchers first converted CO₂ into CO in a membrane electrode assembly using a Ni–N–C single-atom catalyst, and then developed a grain-boundary-rich Cu (GB_Cu) catalyst for acetate production from electrochemical CO reduction.