The abundance of carbon dioxide makes it an attractive starting material for petrochemical-free synthesis of organic chemicals. But turning carbon dioxide into useful molecules has proved difficult. Thibault Cantat and his colleagues at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission in Gif-sur-Yvette have devised a way to generate a potentially large number of chemicals directly from CO2 without the need for high pressure, organic solvents or expensive and toxic metal catalysts.

Using an organic catalyst, the team managed, in one step, to reduce CO2 by replacing the oxygen with hydrogen, and also to attach another atom to the carbon. Previous techniques could only accomplish one or other of these tasks. The authors showed that they could synthesize high yields of a variety of formamides using amines, CO2, silanes as reducing agents and the organic catalyst.

Chemicals other than amines may be obtained by tuning the reagents, the authors suggest.

Angew. Chem. 10.1002/anie.201105516 (2011)