The use of renewables, waste, and carbon dioxide for the cost-effective and waste-free synthesis of materials, life science goods and all kinds of organic products can be an important part to achieve a circular economy in the future. In this respect, efficient catalytic reductive transformations of carbon dioxide offer interesting possibilities to replace existing industrial carbonylations. Nowadays, in the chemical industry, carbonylation processes constitute the largest applications of homogeneous catalysts and many bulk and fine chemicals are produced by such transformations.

In the talk, various possibilities to use green CO from CO₂/H₂ mixtures, formic acid as CO surrogate or directly CO₂ will be shown. Crucial for all these reactions is the development of modern catalysts. Here, the principle of cooperative catalysis can be a guiding principle. By rational design novel ligands and complexes have been synthesized, which allow for unprecedented efficiency in such transformations. Both industrially relevant processes as well as interesting carbonylation reactions for modern organic synthesis will be presented. Furthermore, it will be shown how carbon dioxide itself can contribute to realize CO₂-neutral energy technologies.

Matthias Beller, born 1962 in Gudensberg, Germany, studied chemistry at the University of Göttingen, where he completed his PhD thesis in 1989 in the group of L.-F. Tietze. As recipient of a Liebig scholarship, he spent one year with K. B. Sharpless at MIT, USA. From 1991 to 1995, Beller worked in industry. Then, he moved to the Technical University of München as Professor for Inorganic Chemistry. In 1998, he relocated to Rostock to head the Institute for Organic Catalysis, which became in 2006 the Leibniz-Institute for Catalysis. The work of his group has been published in more than 1200 original publications, reviews and >150 patent applications have been filed (H-index: 160). Since 2016, he is a “Highly Cited Researcher” (among the top 1% of researchers with most cited documents in a specific field).

Matthias Beller is Vice President of the Leibniz Society – one of the major science organizations in Germany and a member of the German National Academia of Science “Leopoldina” and three other Academies of Sciences.

https://www.catalysis.de/en/people/beller-matthias/