Perspectives and state of the art in producing solar fuels and chemicals from CO2

This chapter discusses how reusing carbon dioxide (CO2) is a key element in strategies for a sustainable development as well as a non-negligible mitigation option for addressing the issue of climate change. It highlights the opportunities offered by new vision of CO2 recycling to solar fuels and chemicals. There are different routes to convert CO2 back to fuels. The most-studied area is the hydrogenation of CO2 to form oxygenates and/or hydrocarbons. The chapter discusses the production of hydrogen (H2) using renewable energy. H2 is an intermediate to produce the true solar fuels in the form of liquid chemicals, that is, energy vectors that can be more easily stored and transported. The photoelectrochemical activation of CO2 in artificial leaf-type photoelectrocatalytic (PEC) cells can fully enable the potential of solar radiation by collecting energy in the same way that natural leaves do, but in an intensified process directly producing chemicals/fuels