CO2-Catalyzed Oxidation of Benzylic and Allylic Alcohols with DMSO

CO2-catalyzed transition-metal-free oxidation of alcohols has been achieved. Earlier, several methodologies have been explored for alcohol oxidations based on transition-metal catalysts. However, owing to the cheaper price, easy separation and nontoxicity, transition-metal-free systems are in high demand to the pharmaceutical industries. For this reason, various primary and secondary alcohols have been selectively oxidized to the corresponding carbonyl compounds using CO2 as a catalyst in the presence of different functional groups such as nitrile, nitro, aldehyde, ester, halogen, ether, and so on. At the end, transition-metal-free syntheses of pharmaceuticals have also been achieved. Finally, the role of CO2 has been investigated in detail, and the mechanism is proposed on the basis of experiments and DFT calculations.