Methanol, a widely used chemical and a basic industrial starting material, is usually synthesized from H₂, CO₂, and CO at high pressures and temperatures. Chemists have been seeking ways to make methanol from only CO₂ and H₂ under milder conditions to lower the manufacturing cost as well as alleviate CO₂ emission.

José A. Rodriguez, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY, USA, and co-workers have made exciting progress towards efficient chemical activation of CO₂. The copper-ceria (CeO_x/Cu(111)) and copper-ceria-titania (Cu/CeO_x/TiO2(110)) catalysts they have developed could provide both metal and oxide centers at the copper-ceria interface, enabling unique reaction pathways for the transformation from CO₂ to CH₃OH.
Taking advantage of the synergy of the bifunctional reaction sites, the new catalytic system showed much higher activities than pure metals and bimetallic catalysts. More importantly, this design strategy has paved the way for a variety of tunable heterogeneous catalysts with diverse activities.

• Highly active copper-ceria and copper-ceria-titania catalysts for methanol synthesis from CO₂
  J. Graciani, K. Mudiyanselage, F. Xu, A. E. Baber, J. Evans, S. D. Senanayake, D. J. Stacchiola, P. Liu, J. Hrbek, J. F. Sanz, J. A. Rodriguez,
  Science 2014, 345, 546–550.
  DOI: 10.1126/science.1253057