Selective catalysts are urgently needed for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER), the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and CO₂ fixation/reduction reactions (CO₂RR) in order to replace fossil fuels with renewable fuels. To date, noble metals and precious metal catalysts have achieved the best performance in energy yield and Faradaic efficiency, and have recently reached impressive electrical-to-chemical power conversion efficiencies. However, the scarcity of precious metals makes the search for scalable, non-precious or even metal-free catalysts for the above mentioned reactions all the more important. During the lecture, I will discuss our synthesis efforts to develop functional materials based on metal corrole systems or polymeric materials and subsequently show their application as catalysts for OER/ORRs [1] and CO₂RR [2-4].

[1] Schöfberger et al., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2016, 55, 7, 2350–2355 and Angew. Chem. 2016, 128 (7), 2396–2401. [2] Tiffner et al., Chem. Asian J., 2017, 12 (10), 1048–1051. [3] Coskun et al., Sci. Adv. 2017; 3:e1700686. [4] Tebi et al., ACS Nano, 2017, 11 (3), 3383–3391.