Alkanes are the major components of natural gas and oil which are abundantly produced by the petrochemical industry. They are almost exclusively used as a source of energy following their combustion which can be considered as a waste of a carbon-based feedstock. From the organic chemist’s point of view, alkanes indeed represent a major carbon pool for chemical synthesis which remains poorly explored. To date, the elaboration of complex organic molecules heavily relies on the introduction and manipulation of functional groups, typically carbon-oxygen or carbon-halogen bonds. In this regard, the direct functionalization of aliphatic carbon-hydrogen (C-H) bonds, the most abundant moiety within alkanes, represents a more ideal approach to access molecular complexity. However, there are two major hurdles toward he application of this strategy. First, alkane C-H bonds are very difficult to activate. However, if one can overcome this lack of reactivity, it should then face a daunting selectivity issue: how to activate selectively one single C-H bond within an alkane backbone harnessing many almost identical C-H bonds?
The development of chemical processes enabling the selective conversion of cheap and abundant alkanes into high-value chemicals is one of the Holy grail in organic synthesis. Such endeavour would strongly benefit our society 1) By reducing the amount of chemical waste to access valuable chemical products; 2) By enabling the synthesis of new chemicals with unprecedented properties.
The main objective of this project was to develop a library of small molecules enabling the selective functionalization of alkane through catalytic processes using visible light as a renewable source of energy.
