Source: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 3/4/26
Olefin epoxidation is a process used to generate epoxide chemicals, which are the backbone of the textile, plastic, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries. The current industry-standard process uses harsh peroxides, which are difficult to dispose of safely and emit carbon dioxide, to facilitate oxidation reactions. Water can be used as an oxidant instead of peroxides, but its O-H bonds are difficult to break, requiring high-temperature conditions. That makes using water as an oxidant highly energy-intensive and further contributes to CO2 emissions. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign chemistry professor Prashant Jain's research group, with colleagues from the Universidade de São Paulo and Northwestern University, demonstrated a method combining the power of electricity and energy from visible-light photons to break the H-O-H bonds in water, effectively turning water into an oxidant without requiring high-temperature heating.
Read their study, published by the American Chemical Society, at https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.5c18709.