A domestic research team has developed a new catalyst that converts carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, an industrial feedstock. It is notable for maintaining performance well even at high temperatures.
Senior researcher Kim Hyeon-tak and the team at Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT) said on the 8th that, together with teams from Kyungpook National University, Unitus, and Chungnam National University, they developed a "dual-atom catalyst" in which metal atoms are precisely arranged at the atomic level. The findings were published in November last year in the international journal "Nature Communications."
The technology that converts carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide is regarded as the starting process for producing synthetic fuels and chemical products. However, because carbon dioxide is chemically stable, temperatures typically above 500–600 degrees are required, and in this process the catalyst performance was prone to degradation.
Conventional approaches mainly used metal nanoparticle catalysts such as nickel or copper. But prolonged reactions at high temperatures caused sintering, in which metal particles clump together, making performance prone to decline. To address this, studies on single-atom catalysts that anchor metals one by one have continued, but they also had limits at high temperatures, with atoms migrating or aggregating.
The researchers paired two atoms of copper and nickel and anchored them within a nitrogen-doped carbon structure. This structure was designed to promote the carbon dioxide reaction while suppressing the formation of methane, an unwanted byproduct.
In experiments, the new catalyst produced carbon monoxide with nearly 100% selectivity without impurities such as methane across the 300–600-degree range. It maintained performance for more than 100 hours even under conditions of repeated heating and cooling. The "reverse water-gas shift (RWGS)" reaction that converts carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide has a theoretical conversion limit, and this catalyst achieved a 64% conversion close to the theoretical 66% under the experimental conditions.
Lee Yeong-guk, president of KRICT, said, "By demonstrating the overcoming of stability limits for atomic catalysts and the feasibility of mass synthesis, we expect this to help enhance Korea's competitiveness in carbon neutrality technologies."
References
Nature Communications (2025), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-66608-9