Photocatalysis in flow makes carbon bonds from nearly inert natural gases

Chemists have discovered a tungsten photocatalyst that breaks the nearly inert carbon–hydrogen bonds of methane and other small alkanes at room temperature. The gaseous hydrocarbons are fed into a flow reactor where they react with alkenes, making this a rare example of directly using natural gases as reagents. ‘This could open up an entire new way of looking at how to introduce small alkyl fragments into structures via a relatively simple method,’ says the study’s leader, Timothy Noël from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.