Promoting Water Dissociation and Acetylene Transfer to Lower the Energy Consumption of Ethylene Electrosynthesis via Microenvironment Regulation

The critical challenge in the conversion of electrocatalytic acetylene (C₂H₂) to ethylene (C₂H₄) is excessive energy consumption caused by sluggish hydrogenation kinetics, which still restricts its practical application potential. Herein, we theoretically and experimentally verify that concentrating surface-active hydrogen and C₂H₂ could accelerate hydrogenation kinetics, thereby reducing energy consumption. Then, electrochemically reduced copper (Cu) with abundant surfactants (ER-Cu) is proposed to modulate the microenvironment to regulate the interfacial species. Consequently, a partial current density of C₂H₄ (j_C2H4) of 0.42 A cm^-2 and a turnover frequency of 1.41 s^-1 are achieved over ER-Cu, leading to an energy consumption reduction of 10.3% compared with the thermally reduced counterpart. A series of mechanistic explorations indicates that the as-prepared ER-Cu not only enhances water dissociation but also benefits the adsorption and mass transfer of C₂H₂ feedstocks due to the broken hydrogen bond network, resulting in lower energy consumption.