Catalytic Hydrogenation of Carbon Dioxide to Methanol on MOF-Confined Metal Nanoparticles: A Review

High energy demand due to boosted economic growth has led to heavy consumption of fossil fuels, thus causing massive emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air. A promising solution to reduce carbon emissions is to convert CO2 into methanol (CH3OH), which requires high-performance catalysts. Metal nanoparticles have been in the spotlight due to their under-coordinated active sites. Nonetheless, conventional catalytic substrates have emerged with a decline in catalytic performance due to agglomeration of MNPs. Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) have been acknowledged as alternative platforms to preclude aggregation of MNPs by encapsulation. This review introduces conventional heterogeneous catalysts on CO2 hydrogenation to CH3OH as the first endeavor, then summarizes recent progress of MNPs@MOFs on the same reaction, and, finally, points out the problems that remain unsolved.