15 Paired Electrolysis

Abstract

While paired electrochemical reactions have a history that can be traced back to the 19th century and have been very effectively used for the production of commercial products, the larger synthetic community has only recently started to embrace the opportunities this approach offers to maximize the overall energy and atom efficiency of electrochemical processes. In this review, a summary of these efforts is presented in the context of four classes of paired electrochemical reactions. These classes of reaction involve parallel processing of products at the anode and cathode, divergent reactions that use a single starting material in different ways, convergent reactions that combine products made at the anode and cathode, and sequential reactions that pass a substrate between the electrodes.