Rising costs and green environmental concerns have focused attention on more efficient way of producing chemical products. Room temperature ionic liquids (RTILs), especially in combination with electrochemical activation, provide promise of reduction pollution in processing because of their recyclability and low vapour loss factors. The fundamental and applied aspects of electrolytic processing in ionic liquid media are discussed using data from various direct and catalytic redox processes. It is shown that ionic liquids are potentially very useful for performing important redox transformations, for example alcohol oxidations, carboxylations and CO 2 capture. These results indicated that electrolytic transformations in RTIL media are feasible which present opportunities for developing new real chemical processing applications. The opportunities and challenges for electrochemical engineers in this field are outlined and discussed. 

The electrochemical carboxylation of a range of substituted benzophenones was studied in 1-butyl-1-methyl-pyrrolidinium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)imide ionic liquid (IL, ([Bmpy][NTf 2 ]). As expected, the aromatic carbonyls exhibited electrochemical reversibility for the first reduction to the radical anion at potentials which were a function of the sum of their Hammett substituent constants (). However, in the presence of CO 2 , the electrochemical reversibility was lost and positive shifts in reduction potentials were observed which were indicative of post-electron transfer chemical reaction which has been attributable to the nucleophilic radical anion/CO 2 coupling reaction. Analysis of the positive potential shift a function of sweep rate () indicated that the mechanism is either ECE or DISP1, or mixed ECE/DISP1. Also from the potential shift with , an apparent rate constant (k app), and a pseudo-first order rate constant (k 1), for the coupling reaction was determined and compared to molecular solvent where the rate is over two orders of magnitude lower in IL compared to dimethylformamide (DMF). The low polarity of the IL compared to DMF appears to be the cause of slow kinetics. Finally, plots of k app vs.  were strictly linear indicating that IL does not preferentially interact with any of the electrogenerated radical anions thus implying that the electrocarboxylation reaction may be a useful probe of IL environments and structure on radical anion reactions.

The reductive electrochemistry of substituted benzophenones in [Bmpy][NTf 2 ] and [Bmim][NTf 2 ] ionic liquids is presented where electrochemistry in [Bmpy] medium results in reversible formation of the radical anion and the dianion species indicating that neither protonation nor ion pairing occurs; whereas in [Bmim], its protic nature results in radical anion protonation leading to an ECE or a DISP1 post electron transfer process and thus irreversibility. The mediated oxidation of alcohols by TEMPO is also presented along with a mechanism / kinetic model involving a rate-controlling preequilibrium process which generated the electroactive alcoholate species. The ability of electrochemistry to inform us about the physiochemical nature of ionic liquids, as well as ionic liquids' ability to facilitate and enable electrochemistry, is also discussed.