Carboxylation of Acetylene without Salt Waste: Using thermodynamic predictions to optimize the catalyst and the reaction solvent

The utilization of CO2 as C1 building block is a key towards a sustainable industrial synthesis of base chemicals. In this
work, we developed a circular process for the production of the C4 chemical dimethyl succinate from CO2 and acetylene,
i.e. a C-H carboxylation reaction. The inherent formation of salt waste in such C-H carboxylations has so far been a major
challenge. This was resolved in this work by esterification of the carboxylate product using methanol. The challenge of
enabling a one-pot synthesis in such a reaction sequence is to find reaction conditions that are efficient for all reaction
steps. Here, we applied ePC-SAFT to screen the reaction solvent and the base salt for the reaction to reach high solubility
of both the salt base and the reactants.