MXene photocatalyst turns CO2 into methane 200x better after water stability fix

Researchers at DGIST, with partners in South Korea and Thailand, report a photocatalyst that converts CO2 into methane using light. The team solved a known durability problem with MXene, a conductive 2D material that oxidizes in water, by coating it with a polymer and adding copper nanoparticles. The resulting Cu/f-MXene/RT catalyst produced 18.1 μmol/g of methane, about 200 times the output of the bare TiO2 reference, and held up better in wet conditions. Published in Advanced Energy Materials, the work is at the lab stage. The performance number is a yield per gram of catalyst, not a reactor-scale output. The main open question is whether the polymer protection survives long-term operation and whether the process can scale from milligram tests to something that could actually consume meaningful amounts of CO2. For now it is a useful materials advance, not a near-term commercial solution.