C–H Bond Activation of Methane by PtII–N-Heterocyclic Carbene Complexes. The Importance of Having the Ligands in the Right Place at the Right Time

Abstract

A DFT study of methane C–H activation barriers for neutral NHC–PtII–methoxy complexes yielded 22.8 and 26.1 kcal/mol for oxidative addition (OA) and oxidative hydrogen migration (OHM), respectively. Interestingly, this is unlike the case for cationic NHC–PtII–methoxy complexes, whereby OHM entails a calculated barrier of 26.9 kcal/mol but the OA barrier is only 14.4 kcal/mol. Comparing transition state (TS) and ground state (GS) geometries implies an ∼10 kcal/mol “penalty” to the barriers arising from positioning the NHC and OMe ligands into a relative orientation that is preferred in the GS to the orientation that is favored in the TS. The results thus imply an intrinsic barrier arising from C–H scission of ∼15 ± 2 kcal/mol for NHC–PtII–methoxy complexes. Calculations show the importance of designing C–H activation catalysts where the GS active species is already structurally “prepared” and which either does not need to undergo any geometric perturbations to access the methane C–H activation TS or is not...