Abstract

Currently, more than 40 gigatonnes of CO2 are released annually into the atmosphere as a result of fossil fuel combustion, causing ocean acidification and climate unpredictability. Anthropogenic CO2 emission is seemingly hard to diminish in the near future and, therefore, CO2-capture and sequestration or CO2-functionalization can be viable solutions to address this issue.[1] To use CO2 as a chemical feedstock, namely as a C1 building block, it is essential to equip the process with a nucleophilic catalyst or a highly active reagent, as exemplified by Grignard carboxylation reactions[2] and some recent progress in metal-catalyzed reactions. In this lecture, I will display how we can utilize CO2 not only as a chemical feedstock[3] but also as a molecular catalyst for a stereoselective cyanation reaction[4], a cyanohydrin formation reaction[5], and a transamidation reaction[6]. These newly developed organic synthesis methodologies render unprecedented synthetic pathways for heterocycles, amino alcohols, peptides and also for iterative homologation reactions. The obtained knowledge in CO2 activation will be beneficial in developing new CO2 functionalization catalysis and energy efficient CO2 sequestration processes, which are of great importance for human race.

[1] Y. Yang, J.-W. Lee, Chem. Sci. 2019, 10, 3905-3926

[2] J. M. V. Lauridsen, S. Y. Cho, H. Y. Bae, J,-W. Lee Organometallics, 2020, DOI: 10.1021/acs.organomet.9b00838.

[3] a) M. Juhl, J.-W. Lee, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2018, 57, 12318-12322; b) M. Juhl, M. J. Kim, H.-Y. Lee, M.-H. Baik, J.-W. Lee, Synlett 2019, 30, 987-996.

[4] a) T. Roy, M. Kim, Y. Yang, S. Kim, G. Kang, X. Ren, A. Kadziola, H.-Y. Lee, M.-H. Baik, J.-W. Lee, ACS Catalysis 2019, 9, 6066-6011; b) T. Roy, J.-W. Lee, Synlett, 2020, 31, 455-458.

[5] M. Juhl, A. P. Petersen, J.-W. Lee, unpublished.

[6] Y. Yang, J.-W. Lee, unpublished.

Wednesday 29. April 2020, 11:00h:

Webinar with guest speaker Jiwoong Lee, University of Copenhagen

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