Advances on Transition-Metal Catalyzed CO2 Hydrogenation

Abstract

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main greenhouse gas, the excessive burning of fossil fuels leads to the increasing of CO2 concentration, resulting in global warming. On the other hand, CO2 is regarded as an ideal C1 source due to its nontoxicity, abundance and availability. Hence, the transformation of CO2 into fine chemicals and hydrocarbon fuels in organic synthesis is becoming one of hot research fields. Among them, the transition-metal catalyzed CO2 hydrogenation is an appealing and promising approach for CO2 utilization with wide potential applications, thus leading to selective fromation of 2e, 4e, and 6e reductive products including formic acid, formamide, formate, formaldehyde, methanol and C2+ alcohols under mild reaction conditions. In this review, the recent advances on transition metal complexe-catalyzed CO2 hydrogenation are in detail summarized on the basis of the molecular structures, activities of the homogeneous catalysts, and product selectivity controlling. This review also gives an overview on the in situ catalytic hydrogenation corresponding to the recently developed CCU (CO2 capture and utilization) strategy. Furthermore, the challenges and perspectives in homogeneous catalytic hydrogenation field are also given in this article.