The scale-up and the advancements that have been happening in the last couple of years are really quite incredible. In terms of how close we are to industrial impact—they believe it could happen in 5 to 10 years.

In a forward-looking Perspective, they discuss the current state of technology and the economics of electrocatalytic transformation of CO2 into various chemical fuels. Their analysis finds that short-chain simple building-block molecules currently present the most economically compelling targets. Making an optimistic prediction of technology advancement in the future, we propose the gradual rise of photocatalytic, CO2 polymerization, biohybrid, and molecular machine technologies to augment and enhance already practical electrocatalytic CO2 conversion methods.