Advancement in engineering carbon-supported Cu electrocatalysts for CO₂ RR to multi-carbon products

Meeting the urgent call to mitigate the rising CO₂ emissions is one of the key challenges to guarantee a sustainable future. Converting CO₂ electrochemically into value-added chemicals presents a viable strategy for reducing net emissions and establishing a circular carbon economy. Designing high-performance catalysts that reliably steer selectivity toward multi‑carbon products is a key step in advancing the electrochemical CO₂ reduction reaction (CO₂RR). Copper catalysts are widely recognized for converting CO₂ to C₂⁺ products, but suffer from limited selectivity, catalyst deactivation, and high overpotentials. Carbon-supported Cu catalysts, a novel class of functional electrocatalysts, can unlock new opportunities by offering rich, distinct electronic and structural properties. In this review, the advances of carbon-supported Cu catalysts for electrochemical CO₂RR are comprehensively explored. Firstly, A fundamental understanding of the mechanisms and pathways for CO₂RR to C₂⁺ products, along with the distinctive properties of carbon materials, is provided. Then, the review comprehensively categorized four key strategies, support engineering, alloying, coordination environment, and defect control, that represent the current state-of-the-art for directing the catalytic activity toward C₂⁺ products. The combination of operando spectroscopy and density functional theory (DFT) revealed that the carbon support is not only a scaffold but also effectively promotes charge transfer and stabilizes intermediates and active sites. Unresolved challenges, including low selectivity, poor stability, limited energy efficiency, and ambiguity in mechanism, are summarized, along with future research directions. It is expected that this review outlines state-of-the-art developments and provides general future directions for this research area.