Among the most pressing challenges facing humanity, ensuring sufficient energy supply seems to be the largely impossible, so in parallel our CO2 emissions must be reduced to – at best - halt climate change. Today, the production of fuels and fine chemicals depends mainly on the accessibility of fossil fuels. In other words: We need to find environmentally friendly and economical but productive alternatives to replace fossil fuel-based technologies. The complete, complex solution is the biorefinery, whose technology is based on the use of renewable sources such as biomass, agricultural, urban and industrial wastes. All these wastes can be converted into fuels or chemicals, even on an industrial scale. The main problem is that efficient technologies are not yet available, as these processes are fundamentally different from established chemical technologies. For this reason, a considerable number of chemists are now engaged in the design and development of effective reactions, mostly catalytic, to carry out these important transformations. Moreover, the above reactions can be classified into a special group of catalytic reactions, which can be called complex or tandem catalytic reactions. This means that the whole process consists of several different chemical reactions, for which, unfortunately, different types of catalysts often have to be used. To simplify these processes, numerous multifunctional catalysts have been developed over the past four decades. Some of these catalysts – mainly based on active noble metal centers – have proven to be suitable for promoting the conversion of plastic waste and biomass into fine chemicals. The only problem is that these catalysts have too low an efficiency to build a valuable technology on. Moreover, the price of these catalysts is very high because they necessarily have to contain noble metals. My project aims to develop a new, noble metal-free technology that is a sustainable alternative to the above-mentioned process. This can be achieved by developing multifunctional catalysts based on layered double hydroxides (LDH) with (Brønsted) basic character in combination with Lewis acids (LA). However, for this purpose, a new synthesis strategy is required to incorporate these LA into the structure of LDH.
