Carbon Dioxide Reduction in Room-Temperature Ionic Liquids: The Effect of the Choice of Electrode Material, Cation, and Anion

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• This further supports the notion that there is a silver-specific inner-sphere process occurring, with the desorption process from the double layer around the electrode accounting for the observed differences in the reduction potentials across cations.

• electrode material is likely to be the source of the lower peak potentials

• hese shifts suggest that the formation of a complex through the π–π interaction of the imidazolium cation with the carbon dioxide intermediate is probably unlikely to be the cause of the reduction occurring at a lower overpotential.

• This likely involves the cation binding to the silver surface first, where a desorption process, allowing the CO2 molecule to access the electrode surface, precedes an irreversible reduction of the carbon dioxide, as clarified in (B) of Figure 6.