Electrochemical CO₂ reduction (ECR) is a promising technology to close the anthropic CO₂ circle using renewable energy to achieve carbon neutrality. Future commercialization of ECR will require the development of new catalyst synthesis routes that will allow significant upscaling of catalyst production from current research-level milligram quantities to the kilogram scale and beyond while maintaining the activity and selectivity demonstrated at the research level. In this work, we report on generating and testing submicron-sized nanoporous copper (npCu) particles by using a scalable approach consisting of ball milling brittle Cu-based intermetallics followed by dealloying to add nanoporosity for high surface area. The resulting npCu particles have been tested in an industry-relevant large area (25 cm²) electrolyzer platform and showed Faraday efficiencies (FE) for ethylene up to 34 % at current densities of 75−100 mA/cm² while keeping FE for hydrogen less than 30 %. Our results demonstrate that a combination of ball milling and dealloying is a promising approach to generate large quantities of high activity and high surface area npCu particles for ECR at an industry-relevant scale.

电化学还原CO ₂（ECR）是一种有前途的技术，可以关闭人为CO ₂使用可再生能源实现碳中和。ECR的未来商业化将需要开发新的催化剂合成路线，这将允许催化剂生产从目前的研究级毫克数量大幅提升至千克级甚至更高，同时保持研究级所证明的活性和选择性。在这项工作中，我们报告了通过使用可扩展的方法来生成和测试亚微米级的纳米多孔铜（npCu）颗粒，该方法包括球磨脆性的基于铜的金属间化合物，然后脱合金以增加高表面积的纳米孔隙。生成的npCu颗粒已在与工业相关的大面积（25 cm ²）电解池平台，在电流密度为75-100 mA / cm ²时，乙烯的法拉第效率（FE）高达34％，而氢气的FE保持在30％以下。我们的结果表明，球磨和脱合金的组合是一种有前途的方法，可在与工业相关的规模上产生大量的高活性和高表面积npCu颗粒用于ECR。