There has been a lot of interest in the past few years in the valorization of carbon dioxide to generate industrially relevant compounds, notably energy vectors such as methanol. We wish to report that phosphine-borane ambiphilic molecules can be used as efficient catalysts for the metal-free reduction of carbon dioxide using hydroboranes as reductant and hydrogen source to generate methoxyboranes that can be readily hydrolyzed to methanol. It was shown that in presence of BH3.SMe2 it was possible to generate CH3OBR2 with turn-over frequencies over 800 h-1, making it one of the most active catalysts to date for this transformation. We will discuss about catalyst optimization and mechanistic investigation.

Transition-metal free reduction of carbon dioxide to methanol using ambiphilic molecules

247th National Meeting (2014)

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