Strong Electronic Oxide–Support Interaction over In₂O₃/ZrO₂ for Highly Selective CO₂ Hydrogenation to Methanol

Metal oxides are widely employed in heterogeneous catalysis, but it remains challenging to determine their exact structure and understand the reaction mechanisms at the molecular level due to their structural complexity, in particular for binary oxides. This paper describes the observation of the strong electronic interaction between In2O3 and monoclinic ZrO2 (m-ZrO2) by quasi-in-situ XPS experiments combined with theoretical studies, which leads to support-dependent methanol selectivity. In2O3/m-ZrO2 exhibits methanol selectivity up to 84.6% with a CO2 conversion of 12.1%. Moreover, at a wide range of temperatures, the methanol yield of In2O3/m-ZrO2 is much higher than that of In2O3/t-ZrO2 (t-: tetragonal), which is due to the high dispersion of the In-O-In structure over m-ZrO2 as determined by in situ Raman spectra. The electron transfer from m-ZrO2 to In2O3 is confirmed by XPS and DFT calculations and improves the electron density of In2O3, which promotes H2 dissociation and hydrogenation of formate intermediates to methanol. The concept of the electronic interaction between an oxide and a support provides guidelines to develop hydrogenation catalysts.