Redefining the Nitrogen Cycle Through Electronic Configuration Driven Electrocatalysis for Low Carbon Energy

ABSTRACT

The global nitrogen cycle is essential to food production, chemical manufacturing, and emerging energy systems, yet it has been severely disrupted by fossil‐intensive nitrogen fixation and uncontrolled emissions of reactive nitrogen species. Electrocatalytic nitrogen conversion has emerged as a sustainable engineering paradigm that enables electrically driven interconversion of nitrogen species under mild conditions, offering a pathway toward circular nitrogen utilization coupled with renewable energy. Despite rapid progress, current research remains fragmented, largely treating nitrogen reduction, nitrate and nitrite reduction, and urea and ammonia oxidation as isolated processes. This review establishes an electronic‐configuration‐centered framework to interpret the electrocatalytic nitrogen cycle as an integrated redox network. Five key nitrogen conversion reactions are systematically analyzed, and five fundamental dimensions of electronic regulation are identified, including d‐band characteristics, oxidation and spin states, crystal field effects, defect‐induced electronic redistribution, and heterostructure‐enabled charge transfer. By correlating these electronic descriptors with reaction‐specific bottlenecks, this review unifies mechanistic understanding across reductive and oxidative pathways and highlights performance metrics central to sustainable engineering. This perspective positions electronic configuration as a system‐level design principle for advancing scalable, low‐carbon nitrogen utilization technologies.