Nanoreactor Engineering Can Unlock New Possibilities for CO Tandem Catalytic Conversion to C-C Coupled Products.

Climate change is becoming increasingly more pronounced every day while the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues to rise. CO reduction to valuable chemicals is an approach that has gathered substantial attention as a means to recycle these gases. Herein, some of the tandem catalysis approaches that can be used to achieve the transformation of CO to C-C coupled products are explored, focusing especially on tandem catalytic schemes where there is a big opportunity to improve performance by designing effective catalytic nanoreactors. Recent reviews have highlighted the technical challenges and opportunities for advancing tandem catalysis, especially highlighting the need for elucidating structure-activity relationships and mechanisms of reaction through theoretical and in situoperando characterization techniques. In this review, the focus is on nanoreactor synthesis strategies as a critical research direction, and discusses these in the context of two main tandem pathways (CO-mediated pathway and Methanol-mediated pathway) to C-C coupled products.