The chemical industry relies on fossil-fuel based feedstocks to produce many of the chemicals essential to our everyday lives. Society’s transition to net zero requires these processes to be redesigned to operate with more sustainable feedstocks including captured carbon dioxide and electrolytic hydrogen. We focus on developing a deeper understanding of structure-activity relationships in order to design improved heterogeneous catalysts tailored to work with these feedstock. Building on synchrotron-based techniques and surface-sensitive approaches, we are pioneering novel operando methodologies to interrogate catalytically active sites, adsorbates, and intermediate species under realistic reaction conditions. This has included pushing X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy to operate at much higher pressures than previosuly possible. Current research projects investigate CO and CO2conversion to hydrocarbons and methanol, fabrication of innovative X-ray/electron windows to enable new operando techqniues, and the development of 3D-printed operandoenvironmental reaction cells.
