CO2 Hydrogenation over Oxide-Supported PtCo Catalysts: The Role of the Oxide Support in Determining the Product Selectivity

By simply changing the oxide support, the selectivity of a metal-oxide catalysts can be tuned. For the CO2 hydrogenation over PtCo bimetallic catalysts supported on different reducible oxides (CeO2, ZrO2, and TiO2), replacing a TiO2 support by CeO2 or ZrO2 selectively strengthens the binding of C, O-bound and O-bound species at the PtCo-oxide interface, leading to a different product selectivity. These results reveal mechanistic insights into how the catalytic performance of metal-oxide catalysts can be fine-tuned.