Abstract

Recent attention aroused by the reduction of carbon dioxide has as main objective the production of useful products and fuels – the “solar fuels” – in which solar energy would be stored. One route to this goal consists in first converting sunlight energy into electricity than could be further used to reduce CO₂ electrochemically. Another approach is to directly use the visible photons and photocatalyze the reduction oft he gas in the presence (or not) of an appropriate sensitizer and of a sacrificial electron donor.  By using earth abundant Fe based complexes (mainly substituted tetraphenyl porphyrins) we have recently found that it was possible to selectively and efficiently convert CO₂ and CO, and then to further reduce the carbon monoxide. Our recent results will be presented and discussed.