Ruthenium catalysts as providers of added value to plant oils :

Plant oils, the known precursors of a variety of unsaturated acid derivatives, have also the potential to produce, by action of alkene metathesis catalysis, new intermediates useful for chemical industry, from renewable materials.[1] The numerous applications of polyamides motivate the search of new routes to their monomers from renewable resources rather than from petroleum derivatives.
The objective of the presentation will be to show our efforts to generate long chain aminoacid precursors from plant oils derivatives.[2,3] The approach is based on the cross-metathesis, promoted by selected alkene metathesis ruthenium catalysts, of unsaturated esters, acids and other oil derivatives with acrylonitrile and fumaronitrile associated to the catalytic hydrogenation of the reaction products.