Carbon dioxide is known as the main greenhouse gas, which is enormous produced during human activities. The electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide not only reduce the amount of CO₂, also produce CO₂ to CO, the intermediate for the production of some chemical and fuels. However, the electrochemical reduction process for CO₂ is inhibited due to the lack of a suitable catalyst with high energy efficiency and high conversion rate.^[1] The catalysts with the precious metal catalysts, such as Ag, Au, and Zn, Ni received high energy efficiency during carbon monoxide production. Some researchers utilize these metal catalysts for CO₂ reduction process, and received the corresponding results.^[2] However, the cost of the precious metal is another urgent issue.

In my prior work, the nitrogen-doped graphene is applied as a non-metal catalyst for oxygen reduction reaction process in aidic and alkaline media, finally exhibit high current density and mass activity.^[3,4] In this work, we also heat treated carbon with the goal of doping nitrogen into carbon, and apply this nitrogen-doped carbon as catalyst for CO₂ electrochemical reduction process. The nitrogen-doped carbon catalyst exhibit higher current density and higher overpotential than the corresponding carbon, that is to say, the doped nitrogen atoms play an important role for the reduction process.

[1] C. E.Tornow, M. R. Thorson, S.Ma, A. A. Gewirth, P. J. Kenis, Journal of the American Chemical Society, 134(48), 19520, (2012).

[2] A. Salehikhojin, H. R. M. Jhong, B. A. Rosen, W. Zhu, S. Ma, P. J. A. Kenis, J.phys.chem.c, 117(4), 1627, (2017).

[3] J. Liu, D. Takeshi, D. Orejon, K. Sasaki, S. M. Lyth, Journal of The Electrochemical Society, 161(4), F544, (2014).

[4] J Liu, K Sasaki, SM Lyth, ECS Transactions 58 (1), 1751 (2013)