In response to the current energy and climate predicament, many technologies are being developed to harness renewable resources, of which energy storage is critical. Most of the chemical transformations involved in energy storage are multi-electron (and proton) processes, which are difficult to achieve at the molecular level on well-defined transition metal complexes. The incorporation of redox-activity into metal-ligand scaffolds has dramatically expanded the reactivity scope of numerous transition metal chemistries. One consequence of this is that the ligand can be used to access redox states not typically available to the metal, opening new avenues of observed reactivity and facilitating multi-electron chemistry at a “single” metal site. This has opened up new avenues to energy storage through the production of renewable commodities such as H2 (from water) or CO (from CO2). This talk will provide a background on the trend in redox-active ligands in inorganic chemistry and highlight the work done by our lab on redox-active ligands in relation to the conversion of CO2 into useful C1 feedstocks.

Redox-active ligands for the transformation of small molecules

251st National Meeting (2016)

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