Currently, more than 40 gigatonnes of CO2 are released annually into the atmosphere as a result of fossil fuel combustion, causing ocean acidification and climate unpredictability. Anthropogenic CO2 emission is seemingly hard to diminish in the near future and, therefore, CO2 -capture and sequestration or CO2 -functionalization can be viable solutions to address this issue. To use CO2 as a chemical feedstock, namely as a C1 building block, it is essential to equip the process with a nucleophilic catalyst or a highly active reagent, as exemplified by Grignard carboxylation reactions and some recent progress in metal-catalyzed reactions. In this seminar, I will display how we can utilize CO2 not only as a chemical feedstock and a catalyst but also as a stimulus for a desalination process. The obtained knowledge in CO2 activation and desalination will be beneficial in supramolecular chemistry, biology, CO2functionalization catalysis and CO2 sequestration processes.
