A Short Review of Recent Advances in Direct CO2 Hydrogenation to Alcohols

The continuous increase in anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emission resulting in global climate change has been of great concern in the past decades. With the renewable hydrogen resource being more realistic, the transformation of CO2 with hydrogen into value-added chemicals becomes a promising route to address the environment and climate issues. The chemical synthesis of alcohols which serve as chemical building blocks and the hydrogen energy carrier through direct CO2 hydrogenation has attracted more attention and been studied extensively nowadays. There remain major challenges in developing catalysts with high activity, selectivity and stability. In this review, we summarize the state of the art advances and perspectives in direct CO2 hydrogenation to methanol and other higher alcohols. We focus on the catalyst design, mechanistic investigation and the structure-performance relations of two categories of catalysts, noble metal and non-noble metal. Then, we propose an outlook for further catalyst design and study in this area.