Best practices for experiments and reporting in photocatalytic CO2 reduction

Abstract

Visible-light-driven conversion of CO2 to fuels and valuable compounds has experienced tremendous activity in recent years, aiming at storing solar energy into chemical bonds using CO2 as a renewable feedstock, ultimately at massive scale. Despite these efforts, processes and catalytic systems are still at an early stage of development, with fundamental mechanistic challenges as pre-requisites for device design. In this context, collective efforts currently necessitate the exploration of a variety of approaches. On the other hand, an alignment of practices is required to ensure robustness, precision and accuracy of the results, as well as shared metrics and tools for advancing our understanding of the necessary processes. This Perspective aims to provide guidelines and a framework towards these objectives.