Synthesis of Ureas from CO₂

Abstract

Ureas are an important class of bioactive organic compounds in organic chemistry and exist widely in natural products, agricultural pesticides, uron herbicides, pharmaceuticals. Even though urea itself has been synthesized from CO₂ and ammonia for a long time, the selective and efficient synthesis of substituted ureas is still challenging due to the difficulty of dehydration processes. Efficient and economic fixation of CO₂ is of great importance in solving the problems of resource shortages, environmental issues, global warming, etc. During recent decades, chemists have developed different catalytic systems to synthesize ureas from CO₂ and amines. Herein, we focus on catalytic synthesis of ureas using CO₂ and amines.