Senior Investigators: Prof. Melanie Sanford (Michigan), Prof. Karen Goldberg (UW).

The identification of carbon-neutral alternatives to fossil feedstocks is a critical goal as we move toward a more sustainable society. One attractive process would involve the reduction of carbon dioxide, which could be captured from the atmosphere, with hydrogen, ideally derived from a renewal source, to produce methanol. This overall process would be carbon-neutral, and methanol is a potential gasoline replacement and a starting material for the synthesis of many important platform chemicals, including ethylene and propylene.

Previous work in this area has focused on developing single catalysts that promote the multistep sequence of reduction reactions required to transform carbon dioxide to methanol. CENTC has sought to address this challenge instead by exploiting cascade catalysis; this approach involves the use of a series of different homogeneous catalysts operating in a single vessel to promote the individual steps of the carbon dioxide reduction sequence. This method offers the advantage that the rate and selectivity of each step can be tuned by simply substituting a different catalyst. The proof of concept for this method as illustrated below has recently been published.

Published Papers: