Abstract
While paired electrochemical reactions have a history that can be traced back to the
19th century and have been very effectively used for the production of commercial
products, the larger synthetic community has only recently started to embrace the
opportunities this approach offers to maximize the overall energy and atom efficiency
of electrochemical processes. In this review, a summary of these efforts is presented
in the context of four classes of paired electrochemical reactions. These classes
of reaction involve parallel processing of products at the anode and cathode, divergent
reactions that use a single starting material in different ways, convergent reactions
that combine products made at the anode and cathode, and sequential reactions that
pass a substrate between the electrodes.
