Access to affordable and clean energy as well as decrease CO₂ emissions have been identified among the top objectives for a sustainable development by the United Nations. Therefore, the sustainable synthesis of fuels and chemicals using sunlight as driving force and simple readily available feedstock such as H₂O and waste CO₂ provides a feasible pathway to mitigate increasing CO₂ emissions and transitioning toward a greener chemical industry and a circular economy. The development of robust and efficient photocatalytic platforms based on Earth-abundant elements is key to guarantee a universal and unlimited energy supply.

Our research program aims to design polymeric microphotoreactos functionalized with (photo)catalysts to produce solar fuels and chemicals, while driving new conceptual development in solar-fuels and chemicals production schemes. Our goal is to construct a modular set of semiartificial polymer-based vesicles (polymersomes) by the assembly of selected catalyst-functionalized and nonfunctionalized block copolymers to ultimately drive the electrons from the oxidation of water to the reduction of CO₂-to-Carbon-based fuels and chemicals in aqueous media using solar energy as driving force. This approach is unique because it compartmentalizes and separates oxidation and reduction reactions, and thus, avoiding cross-reactivity. Microfluidics will be used to control the assembly of the catalysts-functionalized polymersomes. Moreover, the use of visible light as a source of energy not only constitutes a clean, economic and sustainable alternative, but will also facilitate the development of high-throughput screening microfluidic platforms to assess for the catalytic activity of the polymeric microreactors. Our approach lies at the interface of synthesis, inorganic chemistry, heterogeneous (photo)catalysis, interfaces, supramolecular chemistry and photochemistry and will unveil new horizons in the field of artificial photosynthesis to tackle global social, industrial and academic challenges.