The doping of zirconium based EHU-30 and EHU-30-NH2 metal-organic frameworks with copper(II) yielded a homogeneous distribution of the dopant with a copper/zirconium ratio of 0.04-0.05. The doping mechanism is analysed by chemical analysis, microstructural analysis and pair distribution function (PDF) analysis of synchrotron total scattering data in order to get deeper insight into the local structure. According to these data, the Cu(II) atoms are assembled within the secondary building unit by a transmetalation reaction, contrarily to UiO-66 series in which the post-synthetic metalation of the MOF takes place through chemical anchorage. The resulting materials doubled the overall performance of the parent compounds for the CO2 electroreduction, while retained stable the performance during continuous transformation reaction.
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