Our best option in curbing greenhouse gas emissions is to include heavy carbon emitters in a viable, sustainable, transitional solution based on a versatile syngas-based circular carbon economy and to establish a universal carbon emissions metric rather than fighting an endless war of politics, policies, and empty promises.

Interface engineering is a powerful strategy for modulating electronic structure and enhancing intrinsic activity of electrocatalysts for water splitting. Here, we grow two-dimensional cobalt-iron hydroxide (CoFe-OH) nanosheets on nickel foam substrates and deposit FeOOH nanoparticles in a rapid and scalable wet chemical approach. The CoFe-OH@FeOOH nanocomposite features abundant active sites and high surface area, allowing fast kinetics for electrochemical water splitting. The electrode has a low overpotential value of 200 mV at 50 mA cm−2 for oxygen evolution. When used as both anode and cathode for overall water splitting, CoFe-OH@FeOOH provides a low cell voltage of 1.56 V to deliver 10 mA cm−2 current density. The synergistic activity is presumed to be from the seamless interface of CoFe-OH and FeOOH, improving conductivity and mass transfer. We envision that this simple approach may offer a new direction for designing efficient electrodes for energy conversion applications.

Porous organic polymers with labile leaving groups offer direct access to reactive functional groups, otherwise not permissible during network formation. In a one-step, open air, self-coupling reaction of tris bromomethyl benzene, we report highly porous, bromine rich C–C bonded porous polymers. Due to the steric nature of the monomer, restrictive crosslinking allowed pendent bromine groups to remain unreacted and provided rapid exchange into amines, nitriles, and thiols. This simple but powerful strategy yielded two isostructural but varying porosity and pendent group density polymers, allowing a comparative gas uptake study. Despite having lower surface area, the porous polymer formed at low temperature showed higher amination due to higher density of bromine groups. The polymers with more pendant groups resulted better CO2 uptake performances than higher porosity polymers with less pendant groups. Although post-modification decreased surface area of materials, amine functionalization greatly improved the CO₂ uptake capacity. The ethylenediamine appended version exhibited 4.7 times increase in CO₂ uptake capacity with highest CO₂/N₂ selectivity of 729 (298 K), and with an isosteric heat of 97 kJ mol−1 at zero coverage.

Thermoelectric (TE) materials could provide an efficient means for recovering waste heat energy if a low cost, scalable, and high figure-of-merit material could be fabricated. Here, we report, for the first time, a wet ball-milling method to achieve high-performance two-dimensional (2D) semi-metallic TiS2 nanoplatelets. TiO2 is milled, annealed, and sintered with sulfur under high pressure. The addition of a small amount of sulfur (S) powder during the annealing period prevents sulfur deficiency in the sintered compact, resulting in the formation of a near-stoichiometric TiS2 composition. The formation of 2D TiS2 nanoplatelets was confirmed by X-ray diffraction, field emission scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive spectroscopy, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The TE properties were measured in the temperature range of 25–100 °C. Further, we obtain that the prepared TiS2 has as high figure of merit as 0.35 at 100 °C. Novel wet ball mill processing strategies for the development of high-performance 2D materials such as TiS2 make it possible to incorporate these materials for scaled-up device fabrication.

Ordered mesoporous carbon materials offer robust network of organized pores for energy storage and catalysis applications, but suffer from time-consuming and intricate preparations hindering their widespread use. Here we report a new and rapid synthetic route for a N-doped ordered mesoporous carbon structure through a preferential heating of iron oxide nanoparticles by microwaves. A nanoporous covalent organic polymer is first formed in situ covering the hard templates of assembled nanoparticles, paving the way for a long-range order in a carbonaceous nanocomposite precursor. Upon removal of the template, a well-defined cubic mesoporous carbon structure was revealed. The ordered mesoporous carbon was used in solid state hydrogen storage as a host scaffold for NaAlH4, where remarkable improvement in hydrogen desorption kinetics was observed. The state-of-the-art lowest activation energy of dehydrogenation as a single step was attributed to their ordered pore structure and N-doping effect.