A monograph on the subject of useful synthetic intermediates from CO2.

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The subject of the reduction of carbon dioxide to provide synthetic intermediates now produced from petrochemicals and natural gas will become increasingly important if the world is to survive global climate change, which may or may not now be a moot point.

In 2000 a symposium on the subject was held at the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco.

Some of the important papers from this symposium have been put together in a monograph and published by the ACS.

CO2 Conversion and Utilization. Chunshan Song, Anne
F. Gaffney, and Kaoru Fujimoto, Editors. American Chemical
Society: Washington, D.C. 2002. xiii + 428 pp. ISBN 0-8412-
3747-6.

Here are some excerpts from a review in Energy and Fuels.

This book, which contains 25 peer-reviewed articles covering various aspects of CO2 conversion and utilization, was developed based on the symposium on CO2 conversion and utilization as a part of the 219th American Chemical Society (ACS) National meeting, March 26-31, 2000, in San Francisco, California. The book is technically divided into 7 sections, including general overview, synthesis of organic chemicals,CO2 reduction over heterogeneous catalysts, synthesis gas production from CO2 reforming, effects of pressure and reactor type on CO2 reforming, photocatalytic and electrochemical reduction of CO2, and use of supercritical CO2 fluid...

...The section on synthesis of organic chemicals begins with a review, which is focused on key issues in CO2 utilization as a building block for molecular organic compounds in the chemical industry. The following papers in the section include (a) selective conversion of carbon dioxide and methanol to dimethyl carbonate over phosphoric acid-modified zirconia catalysts, (b) utilization of carbon dioxide for directly selective conversion of methane to ethane and ethylene over calcium based binary catalysts, (c) copolymerization of carbon dioxide with propylene oxide and cyclohexene oxide over a yttrium metal coordination catalyst, and (d) the role of CO2 for the gasphase O2 oxidation of alkylaromatics to aldehydes. The section on CO2 reduction over heterogeneous catalysts contains one review and two research papers. The focus of the review is concentrated to the CO2 reduction by H2 or CH4 to synthesize highly valuable major building blocks for petrochemical industries such as ethylene, propylene, methanol and ethanol, and high quality fuels such as substituted natural gas and high octane-number gasoline. One of the two papers reports high activities of supported Cu-Mn oxide catalysts for methanol synthesis from CO2-containing syngas. The remaining paper summarizes recent results of the catalytic reduction of CO2 into liquid fuels...

http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/article.cgi/enfuem/2002/16/i05/pdf/ef020054p.pdf (Subscription required.)

It is important to note that these reactions all require a reducing agent, of which hydrogen is an example.