Construction of NiCu heterojunctions for highly efficient and profitable electrooxidation of HMF to FDCA: The indications from techno-economic analysis

Electrochemical oxidation of 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) is a promising carbon-less and sustainable approach to 2,5-furandicarboxylic acid (FDCA) using renewable electricity. However, the performance of this process suffers from low profitability, low efficiency and selectivity if further industrial FDCA electrosynthesis would be applicable. Here we first use techno-economic analysis (TEA) to look at the technological challenges by taking the feeding of the substrates and downstream purification of FDCA into account, and to provide baseline for achievable profitability based on the crucial performance parameters: the faradaic efficiency and current density. Subsequently we designed a NiCu electrocatalyst comprising hetero-structured Cu(OH) 2 and α-Ni(OH) 2 , enabling the rapid transformation of Ni 3 + /Ni 2+ sites for electrooxidation of HMF to FDCA via 5-hydroxymethyl-2-furan-carboxylic acid pathway at ampere-level current density. Moreover, such a NiCu catalyzed electrooxidation HMF-to-FDCA process can be carried out in a continuous fashion with one pass FDCA faradaic efficiency up to 92 % for over 500 h, allowing scale-up for bulk production of FDCA with high profitability ($417.5/ton FDCA ). This work thus showcases the systematic design including the process and highly efficient electrocatalyst for potential industrial FDCA electro-synthesis.