Regolith as catalyst

Last night I was reading a brief for lunar colonisation, although I didn't feel up for poasting on it. Today Yingfang Yao et al. have posted "Extraterrestrial photosynthesis by Chang’E-5 lunar soil", doi 10.1016/j.joule.2022.04.011; there's a writeup at ScienceDaily. They think they can use the regolith, which is titanium-oxide and iron-oxide dust, as a catalyst. It is not a very good catalyst but they further speculate it might be made better, by melting it. This would serve to scrub carbon off CO₂.

The energy for all this chemistry would be provided by solar-conversion. If it works better than nuclear on Mars it'll work that much better at 1 AU with no atmo.

PROVISO 8/22/23: The above assumes we're short on hydrogen so can't make acetates (which also produces oxygen). Hydrogen is admittedly scarce on Luna and on S-type asteroids; instead, their cargo can be shipped from Earth or, better, from hydrated NEAs.