Designing Ultra-Stable and Surface-Exposed Ni Nanoparticles with Dually Confined Microenvironment for High-Temperature Methane Dry Reforming

Conversion of CO₂ and CH₄ into syngas offers a promising route to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, which facilitates large-scale carbon fixation and boosts carbon-neutral goal. The main obstacle for CO₂/CH₄ reforming is the lack of durable catalysts showing both high metal-exposure and high-temperature structure stability, since the reported Ni-based catalysts have difficulty in avoiding deactivation by sintering metal at high temperature. Herein, ultra-small Ni nanoparticles, which display multiple characteristics of high surface-exposure and stabilized structure, are constructed from the evolution of atomically dispersed low-valent nickel under a dually confined microenvironment. Consequently, the developed strategy can not only break the stable-exposure trade-off in heterogeneous catalysis but also provide new opportunity for the engineering of high-performance and sintering-resistant reforming catalysts as well as other durable heterogeneous catalysts.