Chemists discover ways to make new nitrogen products ‘out of thin air’

A smooth movement of nitrogen has brought the world one step closer to making a range of useful products – from dyes to pharmaceuticals – from thin air.

The discovery comes from a team of Yale chemists who found a way to combine atmospheric nitrogen with benzene to create a chemical compound called aniline, which is a precursor to materials used to make an assortment of synthetic to make products.

A study describing the process appears in the journal Nature.

“In the long run, we hope to learn how to use the excess nitrogen in the air as a source for synthesizing the products needed by society,” said Yale chemistry professor Patrick Holland, senior author of the study. .

Much attention is focused on “nitrogen fixation”, a process by which atmospheric nitrogen is used to make ammonia. But as Holland and his colleagues point out, there are many other compounds, materials and processes that can use nitrogen in other forms – if researchers can find ways to make them with atmospheric nitrogen.

Holland said previous attempts by other researchers to combine atmospheric nitrogen and benzene had failed. These experiments used highly reactive derivatives of benzene that degrade before they could produce a chemical reaction with nitrogen.

Holland and his colleagues used an iron compound to break one of the chemical bonds in benzene. They also treated the nitrogen with a silicon compound that allowed the nitrogen to combine with benzene.

“Fundamentally, we’re showing a new way of thinking about how we can encourage nitrogen formation to form new bonds that may be adapted for making other products,” Holland said.