Recent developments in carbon dioxide utilization under mild conditions

Abstract

The use of carbon dioxide as a renewable and environmentally friendly source of carbon is highly attractive. This article focuses on recent developments in important new reactions and new catalysts for homogeneous CO(2) transformations under mild reaction conditions. Other than traditional organometallic catalysts, organocatalysts have also been applied in the chemical conversion of CO(2) and have demonstrated very promising ability in this field. As the coupling of epoxides with CO(2) to form cyclic carbonates or polycarbonates has been well documented, it will be excluded from this article.

Organic reactions for the electrochemical and photochemical production of chemical fuels from CO2 – The reduction chemistry of carboxylic acids and derivatives as bent CO2 surrogates

“…Mechanistic studies [39,40] suggest that the limiting step in the chemistry is the formation of strong SiAO bonds. This provided a chemical opportunity for replacing the silane reducing agent with an electrode-generated reducing agent, shown to take the reduction of the NHC-carboxylate selectively into an 8e -reduced product, methane, as reported by Luca et al [41].…”

“…Reduction of NHC carboxylates with silanes -methanol production [39,40] This particular chemistry was described in Section 3.3.1. The observed chemistry is limited by the strong SiAO bond formed [40].…”

“…The observed chemistry is limited by the strong SiAO bond formed [40]. [75] ð9Þ Aromatic carboxylic acids (60) and ester derivatives (62) have been shown to be electrochemically reduced under cathodic conditions to the corresponding benzyl alcohols (61 and 63 respectively) as depicted in Eqs.…”

Artificial photosynthesis: semiconductor photocatalytic fixation of CO2 to afford higher organic compounds

“…40-42 Many recent reports, 43-53 however on the photocatalytic reduction of CO 2 on illuminated semiconductors show the simultaneous production of CO, H 2 , CH 4 and CH 3 OH with little evidence of further reduction to higher alkanes. In a rare exception, Bocarsly and colleagues 54-55 have reported on the formation of methanol and several higher carbon-number alcohols (e.g., ethanol, propanol, and butanol) in a selective photoelectrochemical reduction on illuminated p-GaP photoanodes, via participation of a reduced pyridyl radical, and later on other photoanodes such as p-GaAs and p-GaAsP 2 .…”

Copper- and copper– N -heterocyclic carbene-catalyzed C─H activating carboxylation of terminal alkynes with CO 2 at ambient conditions

“…Carbon dioxide is an attractive C1 building block in organic synthesis because it is an abundant, renewable carbon source and an environmentally friendly chemical reagent (8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13). The utilization, as opposed to the storage of CO 2 , is indeed more attractive especially if the conversion process to useful bulk products is an economical one.…”