Yves Chauvin, Nobel prize for chemistry 2005

 (version française)

             Yves CHAUVIN, former Director of Research at the Institut Francais du Petrole (French Petroleum Institute) is presently Emeritus Director of Research in the surface organometallic chemistry laboratory of CNRS/CPE Lyon. He obtained his degree from CPE Lyon (Lyon School of Chemistry Physics and Electronics) in 1954. Throughout his career he has shown a remarkable scientific creativity in the area of homogeneous catalysis. This is confirmed by a large number of patents, of publications and of national and international prizes. He is the originator and the creator of several important petrochemical industrial processes. Amongst these we can cite:

DIMERSOL – a process for the dimerisation of propene to petrol for which there are more than 30 production units around the world. This process gave a decisive step forward for homogeneous catalysis in the 1970s.

ALPHA BUTOL – a process which consists of the transformation of ethene to butane-1 and for which there are more than 20 production units working or under construction in the world.

Apart from his extremely fruitful work on industrial processes, Yves Chauvin has always had a very wide and extremely original academic research activity. He has always been ahead of his time. He elucidated the mechanism of the olefin metathesis reaction, the Chauvin mechanism, a mechanism which was rediscovered 5 years later by American researchers. In the 1970s he proposed metallocarbene intermediates, and it was only several years later that such species were isolated. His wide range of activity covered numerous aspects of homogeneous catalysis and polymerisation: olefin and diolefin oligomerisation, carbonylation, synthesis of natural and synthetic alpha amino acids by asymmetric catalysis, and the chemistry of the rare earth elements.

Very recently he has developed a very promising area of homogeneous catalysis in molten salts. This very original area of research enables very selective homogeneous catalytic reactions to be carried out while allowing an easy separation of the transition metal from the reaction mixture. Nobody has previously thought that homogeneous catalysis could be carried out in such a medium. So here again he was first.

In summary, Yves Chauvin is one of the spiritual fathers in the world of industrial homogeneous catalysis and the ideas he brought to the mechanism of olefin metathesis were a particularly remarkable innovation.

JM Basset

Membre de l’Académie des Sciences

Directeur du laboratoire de Chimie Organométallique de Surface

UMR9986 CNRS/CPE Lyon