The catalytic degradation of lignin is of considerable interest because the depolymerization of lignin to small molecules is the initial step for the conversion of lignin to biofuels and other useful chemicals. Because of the complex structure of lignin, methoxyethane was used in this study as a representative model of the most common linkage within lignin, the β-O-4 linkage. The completely renormalized coupled cluster with singles, doubles, and perturbative triples [CR-CCSD(T)] method was used to calculate the energetics of the C-O bond cleavage in methoxyethane by late 3d, 4d, and 5d transition metal atoms and to evaluate the performance of a set of density functionals (BLYP, B97D, TPSS, M06L, B3LYP, PBE0, M06, TPSSh, and B2PLYP) in predicting the reaction energetics.