The climate situation that the planet is experiencing, mainly due to the emission of
greenhouse gases, poses great challenges to mitigate it. Since CO2 is the most abundant greenhouse
gas, it is essential to reduce its emissions or, failing that, to use it to obtain chemicals of industrial
interest. In recent years, much research have focused on the use of CO2 to obtain methanol, which is a
raw material for the synthesis of several important chemicals, and dimethyl ether, which is advertised
as the cleanest and highest eciency diesel substitute fuel. Given that the bibliography on these
catalytic reactions is already beginning to be extensive, and due to the great variety of catalysts
studied by the dierent research groups, this review aims to expose the most important catalytic
characteristics to take into account in the design of silica-based catalysts for the conversion of carbon
dioxide to methanol and dimethyl ether
