NEWS OF THE WEEK
AIR PRODUCTS UPS THE ANTE ACQUISITIONS: Industrial gas maker
raises takeover offer for Airgas
A
IR PRODUCTS & Chemicals has increased its
offer to acquire industrial gas distributor Airgas by $3.50 to $63.50 per share. The new offer values Airgas at $7.2 billion—$5.4 billion for Airgas’ equity plus $1.8 billion in debt. Airgas’ board of directors says it will review the revised offer and make a recommendation FLYING HIGH to shareholders. In Airgas shares have been trading above Air February, Airgas Products’ offer rejected Air ProdAirgas stock price, $ ucts’ all-cash offer of 70 Air Products announces $60.00-per-share $60.00 per share. It offer for Airgas. had earlier rejected 60 two other offers that Airgas rejects offer. were not disclosed Air Products increases offer to $63.50. to the public. Airgas 50 management maintains that all three 40 offers undervalue Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul the company.
CATALYSIS WITH GRAPHENE OXIDE ORGANIC CHEMISTRY: Ultrathin sheets
mediate multiple transformations
I
ADAPTED FROM AN IMAGE COURTESY OF JIAXING HUANG
N ANOTHER FIRST for the versatile graphene fam-
ily of materials, graphene oxide has been found to catalyze alcohol and alkene oxidations as well as alkyne hydrations (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., DOI: 10.1002/ anie.201002160). The discovery suggests that graphenes could be useful beyond the realm of displays and electronics. SURFACE CHEMISTRY Graphene oxide is an intermediate An alcohol oxidation, along traditional routes to graphene, the superimposed on an atomic atom-thick carbon sheets that have taken force microscopy image of materials science by storm. But chemists graphene oxide sheets know relatively little about graphene oxide’s inherent reactivity. “We wondered if O OH graphene oxide was a powerful enough oxH idant to oxidize substrates that would be of interest to the synthetic community,” says organic chemist Christopher W. Bielawski of the University of Texas, Austin. 5 µm WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG
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Air Products, attempting to pressure Airgas management into talks, took its bid hostile on Feb. 11. It also sent out a ballot to Airgas shareholders, trying to get them to vote for Air Products-friendly directors and new Airgas bylaws when Airgas holds its annual shareholders meeting, which must take place by Sept. 17. But few Airgas shareholders have taken Air Products’ bait. As of June 1, when Air Products had extended the deadline of the February offer, only 15,981 shares of Airgas’ 83 million outstanding shares were pledged to Air Products. Moreover, Airgas shares have consistently traded above $60.00 since February, an indication that stock traders have been anticipating a higher bid. Shares have been trading above $63.50 since Air Products revised its offer on Thursday, July 8. Nevertheless, Air Products CEO John E. McGlade says he is “convinced we will have widespread support from Airgas shareholders for this transaction.” The $63.50per-share offer, Air Products points out, represents a premium of 46% over the price of Airgas shares on Feb. 4, the day before the $60.00 offer was announced. Laurence Alexander, a stock analyst at Jefferies & Co. who has been following the takeover drama, says the new offer could break the stalemate. “Air Products’ revised offer, if not accepted, could at least serve to prompt negotiations,” he wrote to clients. He points out that the price Air Products is willing to pay relative to Airgas earnings is high compared with other recent deals in the industrial gas and chemical sectors.—ALEX TULLO
The answer was yes, as Bielawski learned with graduate student Daniel R. Dreyer and postdoc Hong-Peng Jia. With ambient oxygen as the terminal oxidant, they used graphene oxide to make ketones and aldehydes from selected alcohols, alkynes, and olefins. It’s tough to stop oxidation of a primary alcohol at the aldehyde stage instead of proceeding all the way to the carboxylic acid, so graphene oxide could be a valuable addition to the synthetic tool kit, Bielawski notes. “Since graphene oxide sheets behave like a surfactant, their catalytic applications could extend to oilwater biphasic systems,” says Northwestern University graphene oxide specialist Jiaxing Huang. This work points to a growing trend of using carbonrich materials as an alternative to transition metals in catalysis, says Dang Sheng Su of the Max Planck Society’s Fritz Haber Institute, in Germany. Su is part of a team that showed surface-modified carbon nanotubes can dehydrogenate n-butane. The method has potential as a green alternative to metal-mediated catalysis, but graphene oxide production is not yet a green process, Su says. The Texas team is now unraveling the mechanism of the transformation, in particular thinking about how graphene oxide’s surface area may be involved. “I don’t think this reactivity is unique to graphene oxide. There are other chemically modified graphenes out there,” Bielawski says. “This is the tip of the iceberg.”—CARMEN DRAHL
JULY 19, 2010
