Industrial Synthesis of Allyl Alcohols: Outlook and Challenges for a Sustainable Production

[EN] Allyl alcohols are essential fine chemicals in modern manufacturing, employed in a plethora of fields from vitamins to fragrances and drugs. In accordance with this, a plethora of academic synthesis with particular methodologies have been published in the last 20 years, however, these synthetic approaches do not always fulfill neither the sustainability nor the industrial expectations, and any update on sustainable industrial synthesis of allyl alcohols and future developments is barely found. Indeed, the environmental and economic costs associated with the synthesis of allyl alcohols are often unaddressed, despite the sustainability of the synthetic process is key for a modern industry. Here, we first summarize the main synthetic procedures for allyl alcohols studied in academic laboratories, most of them catalytic, and then we put into perspective the industrial manufacturing of allyl alcohols and the market involved, with trends and challenges, contextualized within the current, mandatory, modern sustainability principles. The comparison unveils some mismatches between the academic studies and the industrial needs for allyl alcohols, thus we offer here some ideas about future synthetic developments in the context of sustainable chemistry. We hope that this review will present an overview of how allyl alcohols are actually produced and how they should be produced in the near future, remarking the catalysis as a key factor.