As industrial demand for electricity grows, the high energy cost of electrifying chemical production is of further-increased concern: the most efficient oxygen-evolution-coupled ethylene electrosynthesis system requires >130 GJ electricity per ton of C 2 H 4 and is limited to <10-hour stability when powered using intermittent electricity. Here we pursued ethylene electroproduction employing a more energetic feedstock—syngas—available from thermo-gasification, to reduce electricity consumption of the whole ethylene production process, and we constructed an all-gas-fed system to avoid caustic electrolyte. We identified a key challenge in such a system: when no alkali anolyte was present, known solid-state electrolytes were ineffective in activating the CO-to-ethylene transformation. We therefore explored a suite of candidate ionomers and evaluated codesign for high ion-exchange capacity united with optimized cation binding. We identify polyacrylate as an efficient host that enables C 2 H 4 production at 1.2 V and 100 mA cm − 2 (49 GJ electricity per ton of C 2 H 4 ) in the solid-state system that operates stably for over 80 hours and after 30 on/off cycles when powered using intermittent electricity.
Peng et al. (2026) studied this question.