Recent Advances in the Electrocarboxylation of CO2 with Ketones, Aldehydes, and Imines

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is regarded as an ideal C1 building block for the synthesis of value-added chemicals due to its low price, non-toxic, rich reserves, and recyclability. Organic electrosynthesis, using electricity as the driving force to avoid the use of toxic or expensive reducing agents, has become an efficient and environmentally friendly synthetic method and is widely used in the chemical conversion of CO2. In particular, the electrocarboxylation reaction of CO2 with a substrate containing a specific group, such as C=O and C=N, can be realized to synthesize α-hydroxy acids, amino acids, and their derivatives under mild reaction conditions by accurately adjusting the current or potential. In this review, we focus on the recent advances in the electrocarboxylation of CO2 with unsaturated substrates (including ketones, aldehydes, and imines) in the past five years, which we hope could stimulate further research on electrocarboxylation of CO2 with ketones, aldehydes, and imines and provide a reference for the application of such reactions in green organic electrosynthesis in the future.