Photocatalyzed hydrodecarboxylation of fatty acids: a prospective method to produce drop-in biofuels.

A direct and practical method for photocatalyzed hydrodecarboxylation of fatty acids is reported herein. The catalytic system consists of a commercially available acridinium salt as the photocatalyst and thiophenol as the Hydrogen Atom Transfer (HAT) co-catalyst. Results evidenced that C alkanes were obtained in yields up to 77%.

Biofuels and Nanocatalysts: Python Boosting Visualization of Similarities.

Among the most relevant themes of modernity, using renewable resources to produce biofuels attracts several countries' attention, constituting a vital part of the global geopolitical chessboard since humanity's energy needs will grow faster and faster. Fortunately, advances in personal computing associated with free and open-source software production facilitate this work of prospecting and understanding complex scenarios. Thus, for the development of this work, the keywords "biofuel" and "nanocatalyst" were delivered to the Scopus database, which returned 1071 scientific articles.

Nickel-catalyzed reductive decarboxylation of fatty acids for drop-in biofuel production.

An operationally simple and highly selective method for the decarboxylation of fatty acids under remarkably mild conditions is described herein. The activation of the aliphatic carboxylic acids by esterification with -hydroxyphthalimide (NHPI) enabled efficient deoxygenation to synthesize -alkanes in up to 67% yield, employing inexpensive PMHS as a hydrogen source, NiCl·6HO, bipyridine, and zinc in THF. In contrast to the conventional thermo-catalytic approaches, this protocol does not require high temperature and high pressure of hydrogen gas to deoxygenate biomass-derived carboxylic acids, thus representing an attractive alternative for producing drop-in biofuels.