The potential of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) and covalent organic frameworks (COFs) as platforms for the development of heterogeneous single-site catalysts is reviewed thoroughly.

Global warming issues and the medium-term depletion of fossil fuel reserves are stimulating researchers around the world to find alternative sources of energy and organic carbon. Biomass is considered by experts the only sustainable source of energy and organic carbon for our industrial society, and it has the potential to displace petroleum in the production of chemicals and liquid transportation fuels. However, the transition from a petroleum-based economy to one based on biomass requires new strategies since the petrochemical technologies, well-developed over the last century, are not valid to process the biomass-derived compounds. Unlike petroleum feedstocks, biomass derived platform molecules possess a high oxygen content that gives them low volatility, high solubility in water, high reactivity and low thermal stability, properties that favour the processing of these resources by catalytic aqueous-phase technologies at moderate temperatures. This tutorial review is aimed at providing a general overview of processes, technologies and challenges that lie ahead for a range of different aqueous-phase transformations of some of the key biomass-derived platform molecules into liquid fuels for the transportation sector and related high added value chemicals.

Although metal–organic framework (MOF) materials have been postulated as superior to any other sorbent for CO₂ adsorption at room temperature, here we prove that the appropriate selection of the raw material and the synthesis conditions allows the preparation of carbon molecular sieves (CMSs) with adsorption capacity, on a volumetric basis, highly exceeding those reported in the literature for MOFs. Furthermore, the excellent sorption properties of CMSs over the whole pressure range (up to 50 bar) are fully reversible after different adsorption/desorption cycles.