Tandem catalytic methylation of naphthalene using CO 2 and H 2 .

We report here the direct methylation of naphthalene using CO 2 and H 2 , which is distinctly more effective than the counterpart methylation with methanol. Benefiting from well-balanced specific rates for CO 2 -to-methanol conversion over ZnZrO x and the subsequent methylation over H-Beta, significantly enhanced selectivity (93.7%) to monomethylnaphthalenes was achieved.