The scaling up of electrocatalytic CO₂ reduction for practical applications is still hindered by a few challenges: low selectivity, small current density to maintain a reasonable selectivity, and the cost of the catalytic materials. Here we report a facile synthesis of earth-abundant Ni single-atom catalysts on commercial carbon black, which were further employed in a gas-phase electrocatalytic reactor under ambient conditions. As a result, those single-atomic sites exhibit an extraordinary performance in reducing CO₂ to CO, yielding a current density above 100 mA cm⁻², with nearly 100% selectivity for CO and around 1% toward the hydrogen evolution side reaction. By further scaling up the electrode into a 10 × 10-cm² modular cell, the overall current in one unit cell can easily ramp up to more than 8 A while maintaining an exclusive CO evolution with a generation rate of 3.34 L hr⁻¹ per unit cell.

实际应用中仍然无法实现电催化CO ₂还原反应规模化的发展，但仍面临一些挑战：低选择性，维持合理选择性的小电流密度以及催化材料的成本。在这里，我们报告了在工业炭黑上简便地合成富含地球的Ni单原子催化剂的方法，该催化剂在环境条件下还用于气相电催化反应器中。结果，那些单原子位点在将CO ₂还原为CO方面表现出非凡的性能，产生高于100 mA cm ^-2的电流密度，对CO的选择性接近100％，对析氢副反应的响应约为1％。通过将电极进一步放大为10×10-cm ²模块化电池，一个单位电池中的总电流可以轻松提升至8 A以上，同时保持独家的CO释放，每单位电池的发电速率为3.34 L hr ^-1。