Abstract
AbstractFormaldehyde is one of the most important bulk chemicals and is produced on a million tone scale (52 million tons in 2017).[1] Since the middle of the last century, the challenge has remained to produce the valuable ethylene glycol (EG) directly from the C1 building block formaldehyde in a single step. In the systems reported so far, the reaction conditions were very harsh, often with pressures above 400 bar. However, under milder conditions, the selectivity was on the side of glycol aldehyde (GA) and the hydrogenation product methanol. Only traces of EG could be generated in the presence of a Rh catalyst. Herein, we describe a new Rh catalyst system with pincer ligand, which allows the direct one pot synthesis of EG from easy to handle paraformaldehyde (PFA) at remarkable mild conditions (70 bar, 100 °C) and overcomes the aforementioned limitations with yield up to 40%.
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