Energy Focus
http://pubs.acs.org/journal/aelccp
NGenE 2022: Electrochemistry for
Decarbonization
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N ext Generation Electrochemistry (NGenE) is an
annual, week-long summer workshop focused on
discussing emerging challenges at the frontiers of
research in electrochemistry, centered on the next generation
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of scientists. Since 2016, NGenE has broadened the
perspective of senior graduate students and postdoctoral
researchers from all over the United States. A series of
world-renowned experts in electrochemical science and
technology examine fundamental phenomena at an advanced
level, identifying critical gaps in our understanding that
demand innovative strategies of research and development.
The program assumes baseline knowledge in electrochemistry.
NGenE does not ask “What is electrochemistry?” but instead
“What will electrochemistry become?”
After two years of online programming due to the
restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic,1 NGenE
2022 took place in person. The structure of the program was
built around lectures which highlighted critical gaps preventing
transformative advances in electrochemistry while promoting
vigorous discussion driven by the participants, 36 advanced
graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. The partic-
ipants were subsequently challenged to develop their
perceptions of the most crucial questions facing future
generations of electrochemists. They were divided in groups
of five, each of which produced a short document and a
presentation of their propositions. Here we present a summary
of all the reports, which we share to collect feedback from the
community and motivate the pursuit of directions beyond the
current frontiers of research.
How Can Electrochemistry Play a Role in Decarbon-
ization? In order to combat irreversible climate change
brought about by global warming, large-scale decarbonization
must occur by 2030.2 The greatest opportunities target the
largest emitters of CO2: energy, industry, agriculture, and
transportation.3 Spanning these categories is the healthcare
industry, which as of 2019 accounted for 4.4% of global CO2
emissions.4 Electrochemistry can help decarbonize our society
in many ways from batteries to chemical energy carriers like
green H2. Deploying these solutions would allow a complete
switch to a carbon-free economy. Our society also uses large
amounts of single-use plastic products. If CO2 could be
electrochemically captured from these plastics and converted
into feedstocks for the plastics industry such as C2H4, we could
reduce the carbon footprint of the supply chain, tap into a
paradigm of negative emissions, and enable a circular plastics
economy. As climate change pushes extreme summer temper-
Published XXXX by American Chemical
Society
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atures higher, there is increased pressure on our freshwater
sources, calling for technologies that produce drinkable water
by leveraging electricity that is free of emissions. More broadly,
electrochemical approaches for harvesting pollutants from
water create another opportunity for a circular economy
through pathways of recycling of the very same technologies
that we propose to shift into a decarbonized future, particularly
metals.
Going beyond Traditional Trends in Electrochemistry
for Batteries. The most ambitious goals for carbon emissions
demand that, by 2035, electric vehicles (EVs) must fully
replace the traditional combustion engine for passenger cars.
Storage of electrochemical energy is also expected to play a
central role in the decarbonization of the grid through intra-
day firming of variable wind and solar generation, extending
solar electricity several hours past sunset, and stabilizing the
grid against consecutive days of cloudy or calm weather. Li-ion
batteries are the leading technology for many of these
applications but rendering them dominant in the market
requires the ever-expanding discovery of electrode materials
and architectures that bring about high redox activity, ionic
and electronic conductivity, as well as safety and long-term
stability. The vast expansion of studies in this area has led to
knowledge in the literature that can be contradictory
sometimes, demanding effort to filter out meaningful
information. This challenge amplifies when attempts are
made to approach cell scales relevant to the ultimate
application, especially when also considering the current
push for concepts beyond Li-ion that are further from
commercialization. For example, in Li-S batteries, tremendous
effort has been devoted to preventing the detrimental role of
polysulfide intermediates via cathode design and electrolyte
regulation. However, industrial-scale Li-S pouch cells bring
new challenges, including the use of lean electrolytes and tight
control of dendritic and dead Li growth at the anode, which
dominate failure.5 Overall, it is difficult to solve the remaining
problems in battery design and engineering via a single
strategy, demanding interdisciplinary approaches.6 At this
Received: November 15, 2022
Accepted: December 14, 2022
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ACS Energy Letters http://pubs.acs.org/journal/aelccp
juncture in battery research and development, future strategies
should include (1) understanding the behavior of active
species across scales of not only time and space, but also cell
architecture; (2) improving the accuracy of large-scale
engineering design; and (3) standardizing testing protocols
for more effective knowledge transfer.7 Nonetheless, explor-
atory research of materials for energy storage remains critical,
particularly pursuing the coupling of the high energy of
batteries with the high power of supercapacitors. This goal
demands properly defining the inherent kinetic and thermody-
namic limits of redox transitions in solids, from conventional
intercalation to pseudocapacitive phenomena.
While research directions enabling market penetration of Li-
ion batteries currently dominate the landscape, its growing
inevitability demands that electrochemists consider questions
related to the whole lifetime of the battery, including before
the device is built and after it is spent. Should the predicted
growth in the EV market materialize, an acute need will rapidly
develop for a supply chain of raw materials that combines low
cost with sustainability. The two main sources of Li, hard rock
mining and brine extraction, are inefficient and unsustainable
for future demand.8 Efficient technologies that directly separate
lithium from seawater, produced water, or brine lake sources
without evaporation processes would greatly increase produc-
tion capacity to meet the anticipated demand. Yet all these
potential alternative and untapped sources for lithium share a
common challenge: How can we extract lithium from a dilute
solution with high selectivity and durability? Solutions to this
question would not only impact the supply chain of batteries
but approaches of desalination within the broader water−
energy−food nexus.
Pronounced increases in demand are also expected in other
Li-ion battery components, such as graphite and metals like Co
and Ni,9 which are subject to questionable mining practices.
Furthermore, the battery waste from electric vehicles is
expected to increase to 2 million tons by 20308 and 8 million
tons by 2040,10 which translates to over 1200 GWh in spent
battery materials.9 Currently less than 5% of spent battery
material is recycled with the rest ending up in storage or
landfills.8 The current recycling methods are inadequate.
Direct use is difficult due to the complexity of second life
applications, pyrometallurgy is extremely energy intensive, and
hydrometallurgy uses highly corrosive media to extract the
metals.10 Utilization of these waste materials as a source will
ensure that these metals will be used in high-value applications
in the future.
Challenges in Electrochemical Separations. Advances
in electrochemistry could be the key to leverage electricity free
of emissions for the extraction of valuable ions from natural or
waste sources. Several pathways are available, each with their
specific drawbacks where research has a crucial role to play.
Capacitive deionization (CDI) removes ions from water
through the formation of a double layer when a potential is
applied to an electrode. The capacitor can be then discharged
on a different stream for disposal or to concentrate the salts for
further refinement and usage. CDI employs low applied
potentials and, thus, low energy inputs, which, thanks to the
high reversibility of the process, can be recovered during ion
discharge, mitigating its carbon footprint. This technology is
promising due to its short operation time, but it is held back by
its low efficiency of ion removal. Overcoming this challenge
demands the design of electrode materials with low cost,
excellent electrical conductivity, reasonable pore size distribu-
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tion, and high specific surface area. Further selectivity could be
added by functionalizing the membranes with groups that
selectively bind ions of interest. These requirements make CDI
a good candidate to leverage emerging advances in platforms of
3D printing, for instance, of conductive carbons. This approach
would harness synergies with the research of additive
manufacturing to control device geometry (e.g., dimension,
porosity, and morphology) from nanoscale to macroscale,
which have already witnessed growth in the context of
electrodes for energy storage.11
Pushing CDI forward demands solutions to a classical, yet
elusive challenge in fundamental chemistry: the determination
of the real area of electrochemical activity.12 Accurate
measurements are required in order to predict the amount of
ions adsorbed with confidence, to subsequently evaluate the
efficiency of the process. Several methodologies can be used,
but it is important to do so with an understanding of inherent
errors, and appropriate control measurements need to be put
in place. For instance, measuring capacitance via impedance
measurements provides high sensitivity, but it requires a
theoretical circuit to fit the data, which can be daunting for
complex 3D materials. Metal deposition and stripping have a
robust track record,12 but the center to electrodeposit needs to
have an affinity to the electrode material, and only a monolayer
should be formed for accuracy. The topic of measurements of
electrochemical surface area continues to be the object of
vigorous debate across many scientific domains, with novel
approaches still being proposed that point at untapped
opportunities for progress.13
In the particular context of recovery of alkali metals, CDI
can be augmented by leveraging the selective uptake of ions in
the bulk of the electrode material, rather than just double layer
formation at the surface. The best example is to borrow from
the extensive knowledge of electrochemical intercalation
developed in Li-ion batteries to use materials such as FePO4
or MnO2 as cheap, selective, and efficient electrodes to directly
extract lithium from water sources. This method is still highly
reversible, albeit less energy efficient than conventional CDI. It
is challenged by selectivity challenges imposed by the high
concentration of Na in the same sources, especially seawater.
The challenge of interference does not exist in batteries, where
the electrolyte always has a high concentration of the desired
ionic carrier. This aspect demands a dedicated effort of
research of materials for this application, rather than simply
borrowing from the battery space. Critical in this endeavor will
be an understanding of the intercalation mechanisms in the
presence of multiple metal cations, leveraging simulations
along with operando characterization techniques.
Electrodialysis (ED) involves the transport of ions in
solution through ion-exchange membranes (IEMs) driven by
an applied electric current. IEMs have charged functional
groups that enable counterions to pass through while allowing
co-ions and water to retain. An ideal IEM will have both high
ionic conductivity (i.e., permeability), to reduce ohmic
resistance, and high selectivity for counterions over co-ions
(i.e., permselectivity). However, increasing ionic conductivity
usually leads to a decrease in permselectivity.14 This trade-off
means that improving separation of ions usually comes at the
expense of a decrease in energy efficiency. To optimize the
design of IEMs, it is critical to develop a framework to describe
the fundamentals of the conductivity-permselectivity relation-
ship. These relationships could be manipulated with the design
of metal-selective ligands to further functionalize IEMs in order
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to enable electrodialysis systems with specific ion recovery into
pure waste streams. Ion-capture electrodialysis has recently
been suggested as a method for capturing multiple target ions
simultaneously (Figure 1).15 The multifunctionality of this
Figure 1. Schematic concept of a cell for ion capture electro-
dialysis, where multiple cations can be selectively captured from
the same waste stream. Major components are indicated. The
cathode attracts anions from the feed with the assistance of an
anion exchange membrane. In turn the cathode attracts cations,
which are further separated by a series of cation membranes with
varying selectivity.
novel approach represents an opportunity to design ligands to
selectively capture a variety of critical metal ions from mixed
liquid streams in an economical fashion, potentially by using
polymeric frameworks different from current fluoropolymers.
For example, to process lithium-ion battery waste-streams
obtained from hydrometallurgical methods, we could envision
an electrodialysis system with 3 membranes specially designed
for the capture of Li, Co, and Ni ions, perhaps with the
inclusion of bipolar membranes that selectively tune the pH of
the solutions. The resulting enriched solutions could be further
processed via electroplating for selective extraction of the
transition metals.16 Given that these technologies are in the
early stages, much research remains to be conducted that
established clear principles of design.
Lastly, electrocoagulation (EC) pretreats water electro-
chemically to remove harmful pollutants that may contribute
to membrane fouling down the line of treatment. The
electrolyte in this case is the water with the pollutant species
that need to be removed. The cathode is an inert material
where water is reduced to H2, and the evolved gas forms
bubbles to which pollutants bind that then float to the top,
forming a stable floc that can be sieved off. The anode is
usually Al or Fe and operates sacrificially. The metal is oxidized
into cations which precipitate, adsorb pollutants and can be
filtered out. Due to the elevated chemical complexity of
polluted water streams, the mechanism for removal is not well
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understood. A better atomic level understanding might lead to
better design of EC technology.
EC suffers from scalability, as reactors have not been
designed and tested in a systematic fashion to optimize the
systems for industrial applications.17 This effort would also
benefit from modeling of the processes. Some transport
techniques have been applied but they have not been leveraged
to their fullest extent to optimize reactor design. Smaller length
scale computational techniques, such as density functional
theory (DFT) or molecular dynamics (MD), could be used to
further understand these complicated mechanisms and the
chemistry of competing reactions, as well as answer key
questions, such as how are pollutants behaving as adsorbates
on precipitant surfaces? How are they behaving as colloids
before floating to the floc? And finally, are there other
electrode materials that can improve reaction kinetics?
The implications of the research in these technologies are far
reaching. While discussed in the context of supply chain and
recycling, treatment of water is crucial from human
consumption to agriculture. In the context of electrochemistry,
advances in our ability to control CDI, ED, and EC will come
hand in hand with improved understanding of the
fundamentals of porous electrodes, which are central to
batteries that store energy with high density, rate, and lifetime.
Enhanced knowledge of the trade-off between ionic con-
ductivity and permselectivity in IEMs will be useful for
separations beyond just water. And the computational study of
interface behavior for electrocoagulation can benefit our
general knowledge of electrochemical interfaces.
Electrocatalysis for a Circular Economy. Advancing
electrocatalysis will remain central to the decarbonization of
several sectors and to push us toward circularity in our
industrial processes. It can produce green H2 not only for use
in fuel cells to power heavy-duty transport, such as trucks,
planes, and ships,18 but potentially for the production of steel
and cement. Another highly valuable half-reaction would be
CO2 reduction,19 which could help decarbonize many
industries and supplement water cleanup.20 Among the
possible products, C2H4 is a chemical feedstock used to
make food packaging, bottles, bags, detergent, and insulation.
In addition, C2H4 can be turned into fixation products that are
carbon dense or have long duration of usage, such as ethylene
oxide/ethylene glycol (polyester for textiles), ethylene
dichloride (a precursor of PVC plastics), and styrene (rubber
found in tires). The reduction of N2 or NO3− to NH3 would
help decarbonize the fertilizer industry, ranked as one of the
top four emitters of CO2.21 Anodic processes can also
contribute to decarbonization efforts, particularly by decreasing
the energy input required to produce clean water. Electro-
catalytic oxidation of organic species present in wastewaters
can help in the water remediation process.22 Oxidation of poly-
and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) specifically is currently
being explored to remedy their unacceptable content in certain
water streams.22 Furthermore, the catalytic oxidation of N2 to
NO3− would significantly decrease the energy demand of NH3
production, by creating a concentrated stream of nitrate which
would later be reduced to ammonia.23
Combinations of these reactions could have knock-on effects
on the decarbonization value of other emerging technologies.
For instance, among many applications, urea (H2NCONH2)
and alkylated urea (R1NHCOHNR2) are candidates as mild
extractants of metal ions in hydrometallurgical separations
discussed above in the context of battery recycling. Conven-
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tionally, their synthesis involves the reaction of NH3 and CO2
under harsh conditions, consuming approximately 80% of
global NH3 production and about 2% of world energy.
Alternative, the electrocatalytic synthesis of urea using CO2
and N2, atmospherically abundant feedstocks, under ambient
conditions has shown promise and should be further advanced.
For this attractive future to become present, research on
developing catalyst materials and deciphering structure−
activity relationships is still urgently needed. Control of the
reactions to meet the benchmarks of industrial implementation
remains lacking for many of these processes, especially as our
ambition with the complexity of the reaction increases, such as
with the precise transformation of organic bonds to transform
CO2 to multicarbon products or C−N coupling during the
synthesis of urea. First, a catalyst needs to be stable. To achieve
this, the construction of molecular catalysts requires more
attention to avoid the degradation of the active, heterogeneous
species. Careful construction using precatalyst species will be
necessary to achieve robustness. The second characteristic of a
good catalyst is high activity or high rates of transformation. In
this regard, it is important to continue to challenge the
seeming inverse relationship between activity and stability.
Finally, the selectivity of the catalyst to lead the reactions to
the desired product should be considered, especially for
complicated atomic couplings. Electrocatalysts that satisfy all
these requirements remain scarce. The study of nature will
continue to provide inspiration for optimal catalytic processes
that are efficiently conducted by different enzymes. These
natural systems could provide a better understanding of
molecular species to incorporate them into heterogeneous
systems and scale them to industrial applications. To achieve
the intensification of electrocatalytic systems at lower
concentrations, an improved design of catalysts bottom-up
will be necessary.
Clearly, both reduction and oxidation half-reactions possess
high potential but remain saddled by the cost of production.
For example, reduction of CO2 to C2H4 is projected at around
∼$1.04 per kg, against a market price of ∼$1.2 per kg.24
Financial viability relies on external factors, such as possible
decreases in the price of electricity. A stretch goal for the field
that promotes economic efficiency would be to ultimately pair
productive electrocatalytic half-reactions into the same electro-
chemical cell, thus moving away from sacrificial electrodes and
one reaction of interest. The classical model for this goal would
be the chlor-alkali process, where the oxidation of Cl− is
coupled with the reduction of H2O in a large electrochemical
cell to convert NaCl solutions to Cl2, H2, and NaOH, all of
them important feedstocks for the chemical industry. In an
ideal scenario, the two half-reactions would operate at
potentials that are close in value, thus minimizing the energy
input needed to drive the processes.
Electrochemical engineering will be needed to develop
techno-economic models that identify the most energy-
efficient and cost-effective combination of reduction and
oxidation reactions. Techno-economic models must connect
key economic and performance parameters with price targets
for the various electrochemical systems.25 Understanding at an
early stage the performance needed for electrochemical
technologies to achieve parity with commercial alternatives is
key for assessing feasibility and allocating resources more
effectively to technologies based on their potential.26
Furthermore, these models should internalize projections for
changes in renewable electricity costs, natural gas costs, policy,
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and transportation costs. Such mapping is not necessarily
constrained to a cell with a single electrolyte, since conducting
membranes could close the ionic circuit while separating the
two half-reactions, much like they also prevent crossover in
flow batteries. Ideally, the process would be optimized not only
by the amount of energy used per quantity of useful product,
using inputs like distance between streams, membrane
overvoltage, or required pretreatment, but also by the energy
need for downstream separation of the products. Emerging
examples of new synergies between two reactions with
relevance in decarbonization already exist in the literature,27
demonstrating both the promise and viability of this concept.
The Age of Machines in Electrochemistry? Machine
learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) can accelerate the
design and discovery of new materials and processes, by
augmenting the analysis of complex data sets and extracting
predictive trends. Electrochemistry is no exception.28 ML
predictions based on existing databases can be performed to
determine chemical-structural-functional relationships in a
variety of compounds. These automated processes are ideally
informed and trained by computations with lower throughput,
but higher information complexity, such as ab initio DFT, MD,
or finite element models, ultimately building processing loops
where ML/AI guides supplementary computations.29 The
incorporation of AI in the design of materials enables
exploration of vast and diverse chemical space for sophisticated
sets of metrics that other methods cannot handle effectively.
An example would be electrocatalyst-electrolyte couplings that
result in (1) high selectivity toward the desired hydrocarbons,
(2) fast kinetics, (3) low overpotentials, and (4) enhanced
durability at relevant operating conditions. AI can then identify
undiscovered sets that could result in unprecedented perform-
ance. Aside from using properties as metrics for investigation,
there is emerging evidence that it is possible to screen
according to whether there are known or plausible synthetic
pathways for the compounds of interest, a powerful tool that
should continue to be pursued. Systems identified through this
approach can then be selected for synthesis and experimental
testing. Results from these experiments can then be fed back
into ML/AI pipelines to refine discovery and selection.
Ultimately, importance must be placed on creating stand-
ardized, open-source, and collaborative databases from
computational and experimental data to feed these AI tools
and further accelerate material discovery and optimization
collectively.
While augmenting current approaches with ML/AI has the
potential to speed up the selection of materials and
electrochemical processes, the urgency of decarbonization
demands considering further shifts in paradigms to maximize
the success and speed of possible electrochemical solutions.
Our current understanding of fundamentals of electro-
chemistry dictates that researchers need to consider not only
electrode kinetics, ion transfer, and local structure when
targeting advances but also the composition and structure of
the electrochemical environment, the morphology of the
materials, macroscale conditions of reaction, and realistic
transport phenomena. In this context, ML and AI demand
access to enough observables and inputs of high quality,
subject to the smallest possible errors. Such goal could be
achieved with automation of experimentation, where high-
throughput methods under well-defined conditions are guided
by the ML/AI models based on the desired outcomes. For
instance, we envision that such automated processes could
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efficiently survey catalysts with different compositions and
morphologies and assess their integration and coupling with a
wide range of electrolytes with varying functional groups,
charge densities, and gaseous and liquid transport properties.
Automated experimentation could more quickly serve to
validate predictions from high-throughput computation
because they would be matched in speed, while also building
sophisticated and frequent feedback mechanisms between
approaches, as exemplified in Figure 2 in the broad case of
materials acceleration platforms.30
Figure 2. Example of organizing principles that integrate machine
learning and artificial intelligence with data and computations,
including automated experimentation, to generate Materials
Acceleration Platforms, which could be applied to electrochemical
science. Adapted from ref 30, Elsevier 2020.
Accelerating the Transformation through Translation
between Research and Deployment. Every revolutionary
technological advancement begins with a fundamental
scientific discovery. Engineers and investors then build upon
such fundamental discoveries with the goal of designing a
product that is commercially viable and readily available for
public consumption. To ensure continued development and to
keep up with ever-evolving global challenges, industry must
rely upon scientific research to continually advance new
technologies. To ensure sustained progress, it is essential that
academia and industry create and sustain dialogue that not
only leads industry to use recent scientific developments most
effectively, but also for scientists to be mindful of the most
pressing industrial challenges in their research endeavors.
Fundamental research is often slow and painstaking, so it is
essential that it is purposefully geared toward global needs and,
consequently, its impact fully maximized. Often in electro-
chemistry, industry and academia work in isolation on
fundamentally different aspects of the technology, impeding
rapid progress. With a global need for decarbonization on the
horizon, academia and industry must cooperate to tackle the
next-generation challenges in electrochemistry and achieve the
ambitious decarbonization targets. Techno-economic analyses
should be integrated into the research process early, to derive
the cost of desired electrochemical processes from factors such
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as raw material price, reagent consumption, electrical power
consumption, the lifespan of the electrode, and separation cost
in the production process. These analyses can serve to
prioritize directions and sharpen the focus on the critical
fundamental questions most impeding meaningful progress
toward societal impact.
Issues of translation were already introduced above in the
context of batteries. In turn, there are several factors that create
gaps in the scalability of electrocatalytic decarbonization. Every
year, several studies report significantly enhanced activities
with outstanding stability, seemingly satisfying ambitious
application targets. However, these performance metrics are
often reported in setups, such as rotating disc electrode (RDE,
Figure 3), which are limited to such low current density (<10
mA/cm2) that the outputs of transformed molecule are in the
scale of mg/cm2, so highly impractical from the perspective of
deployment in a factory as to render them meaningless to
industry. Yet the tighter constraints to mass and electron
transfer introduced in large commercial systems like membrane
electrode assemblies (MEAs, Figure 3) or different flow
regimes, needed for continuous production, result in a
significant shift of performance outcomes. Sometimes,
introduction of more realistic components can actually be
beneficial. An example is aqueous CO2RR, where gas diffusion
electrodes (GDEs) needed in a realistic device decrease CO2
mass transport limitations near the catalyst surface, leading to
increased achievable current densities (>1 A/cm2) while
decreasing competition from the H2 evolution reaction
(HER).31 Unfortunately, more often, upscaling and commerci-
alization of advanced flow electrolyzers comes with several
challenges. A large increase in electrode area may lead to a
significant ohmic drop and shift in the cell operation
conditions, reaction regime, and product selectivity. A larger
anodic area also implies a more significant anodic dissolution
and deposition over the ionic membranes, jeopardizing the
durability of the cell. Ultimately, most catalysts with promising
outcomes in idealized cells fail to translate these performances
at scales that matter and can even perform worse than
benchmark materials.
One aspect impeding accelerated progress is the lack of
uniformity in electrocatalytic experimental designs, testing
standards, and reporting methods (e.g., how faradaic efficiency
is defined). Unifying these reaction conditions and reporting
formats into standard or translatable criteria is imperative.
When it comes to technical hurdles, faradaic efficiency,
reaction overpotential, selectivity, current density, and
durability are the most important metrics in catalyst design.32
The definition of benchmarks should continue to increase in
frequency in the literature. A major technical hurdle toward
this goal is the cost, complexity, and laborious requirements of
implementing realistic devices, especially with MEAs. As a
possible avenue, attention could be focused on developing
more rapid and universally accessible testing that can translate
relevant descriptors to the MEA level. It has been speculated
that a gas diffusion electrode (GDE, Figure 3) or the floating
electrode technique (FET), if used meticulously, could serve as
a stepping stone for certain performance metrics.33 The
development of standardized accelerated stress tests (ASTs) is
a critical requirement to evaluate the long-term activity,
durability, and selectivity of catalysts in a time-efficient fashion.
The direction of translation can also be flipped, by identifying
degradation markers in large commercial systems that then can
be studied on smaller and high-throughput systems while still
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ACS Energy Letters http://pubs.acs.org/journal/aelccp
Figure 3. Scheme illustrating possible pathways to effectively translate electrocatalyst performance from the lab to the industrial scale.
Adapted from ref 33, American Chemical Society 2022.
maintaining at least some critical metrics close to realistic
conditions. Overall, the goal should be to create positive
feedback loops, which can be further enhanced with creative
application of machine learning algorithms that spot hidden
trends.
All in all, it is imperative for electrochemists in academia and
industry to have enduring collaboration so that global issues
are always tackled with the best available technologies. This
collaboration starts from the acknowledgment of key
philosophical differences between these two. Often academics
and industrialists have diverging insights, which inhibits
communication and mutual understanding, especially on
matters of intellectual property. Although overcoming existing
barriers can be daunting, it is not impossible. Government
entities (e.g., the National Laboratories of the US Department
of Energy) can play a role as bridges between communities.
Rather than directly passing the scientific discoveries to
industry for scale-up and commercialization, they have unique
capabilities to enable academia and industry to collaborate at
an early stage, to accelerate the closure of the gap between
discovery and commercialization. In such a setting, industry
can benefit from the reduced financial risk, access to leading
research capabilities at every stage of development, and a faster
rate of innovation. In turn, academia can benefit by learning
about the challenges faced at the industrial level, the potential
for more funding opportunities, and career paths.
Coda: The Need for Engagement Outside Our
Research Community. The excitement generated by the
many prospects of electrochemistry to deliver a sustainable
society free of emissions is an opportunity to also overcome
mistakes of the past by, this time around, considering long-
term externalities such as recycling and second-life strategies as
integral to the development of new technologies. Historically,
externalities have been, at best, a second thought in the push to
modernize our society, especially when considering that the
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negative impacts often disproportionately affect minority and
low-income communities.34 To mitigate this historical over-
sight, an interdisciplinary approach is needed early in the
process of development, including experts in life cycle
assessment (LCA) of the proposed solutions. Special emphasis
should be placed on the end-of-life impacts. This assessment
will help give a more holistic view of the actual trade-offs of our
proposed solutions through a practical and equitable lens.
Because we are on a race against the clock of irreversible
climate effects if the global average temperature reaches 2 °C,
engagement with policymakers and stakeholders must also
start now to ensure swift acceptance, uptake, and implementa-
tion. In summary, decarbonization encompasses technologies,
policies, and execution at an integrated large scale. By
considering and addressing these factors up front, we increase
our chances of reaching truly transformational outcomes in a
span of time that has no precedent in our history.
Jordi Cabana orcid.org/0000-0002-2353-5986
Thomas Alaan
George W. Crabtree
Po-Wei Huang
Akash Jain
Megan Murphy
Jeanne N’Diaye orcid.org/0000-0002-6031-8833
Kasinath Ojha
George Agbeworvi
Helen Bergstrom orcid.org/0000-0002-1209-6113
Simon Gersib
Hassan Harb
Adrien Stejer
Génesis Quiles-Galarza
Oliver Rodriguez orcid.org/0000-0003-2350-1214
Isabella Caruso
Josué M. Gonçalves
Grace Y. Chen orcid.org/0000-0002-6899-5943
https://doi.org/10.1021/acsenergylett.2c02587
ACS Energy Lett. 2023, 8, 740−747
ACS Energy Letters
Carlos A. Fernández
Hanqing Pan
Kabian Ritter
Yingjie Yang
Haozhe Zhang
Ana Cristina García-Á lvarez
Stefan Ilic orcid.org/0000-0002-6305-4001
Khagesh Kumar
Rachel Silcox
Yu Yao
Hakhyeon Song orcid.org/0000-0003-2343-2212
Stoyan Stoyanov
Mohit Saraf orcid.org/0000-0002-2566-5581
Celine H. Chen orcid.org/0000-0002-1868-942X
S. M. Supundrika Subasinghe
Reginaldo Gomes orcid.org/0000-0001-9613-545X
Shuangyan Lang
Eamonn Murphy orcid.org/0000-0003-4675-0846
Arashdeep Singh Thind
Yu Zheng
■ Author Information
Complete contact information is available at:
https://pubs.acs.org/10.1021/acsenergylett.2c02587
Notes
Views expressed in this Energy Focus are those of the authors
and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
The authors declare no competing financial interest.
■ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Next Generation Electrochemistry is funded by the National
Science Foundation through grant DMR-1661629.
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