Propane dehydrogenation (PDH) to propene is an important alternative to oil-based cracking processes, to produce this industrially important platform chemical^1,2. The commercial PDH technologies utilizing Cr-containing (refs. ^3,4) or Pt-containing (refs. ^5–8) catalysts suffer from the toxicity of Cr(vi) compounds or the need to use ecologically harmful chlorine for catalyst regeneration⁹. Here, we introduce a method for preparation of environmentally compatible supported catalysts based on commercial ZnO. This metal oxide and a support (zeolite or common metal oxide) are used as a physical mixture or in the form of two layers with ZnO as the upstream layer. Supported ZnO_x species are in situ formed through a reaction of support OH groups with Zn atoms generated from ZnO upon reductive treatment above 550 °C. Using different complementary characterization methods, we identify the decisive role of defective OH groups for the formation of active ZnO_x species. For benchmarking purposes, the developed ZnO–silicalite-1 and an analogue of commercial K–CrO_x/Al₂O₃ were tested in the same setup under industrially relevant conditions at close propane conversion over about 400 h on propane stream. The developed catalyst reveals about three times higher propene productivity at similar propene selectivity.

A new chiral manganese PNP pincer complex is described. The asymmetric hydrogenation of several prochiral ketones with molecular hydrogen in the presence of this complex proceeds under mild conditions (30–40 °C, 4 h, 30 bar H₂). Besides high catalytic activity for aromatic substrates, aliphatic ketones are hydrogenated with remarkable selectivity (e.r. up to 92:8). DFT calculations support an outer sphere hydrogenation mechanism as well as the experimentally determined stereochemistry.

Mechanistic studies of the catalyst [Pd ₂ (dba) ₃ /1,1′-bis( tert -butyl(pyridin-2-yl)phosphanyl)ferrocene, L2 ] for olefin alkoxycarbonylation reactions are described.