With the support of the Chemical Synthesis (SYN) program in the Division of Chemistry Professor Daniel Mindiola of the University of Pennsylvania is studying the development of well-defined complexes that can challenge current paradigms of acid-base chemistry. Specifically, this proposal seeks the deprotonation of un-activated carbon-hydrogen bonds in vast resources such as natural and shale gases. The proposal aims to convert these vast natural resources into liquid fuels or chemical reagents of greater added-value, which have far superior advantages for both transport and storage. Acids and bases are quintessential topics covered in every general or advanced chemistry courses since these are utilized in a variety of everyday applications ranging from water purification, selective precipitation and metal refinement, but extend to biological ramifications such as buffers and the importance of pH and equilibria. An extreme of an acid is a super acid, a fundamental topic in organic chemistry, which is heavily tied to mechanisms involving the rearrangement of carbon-hydrogen (C-H) and carbon-carbon (C-C) bonds. The other extreme, a super base, is less known. The original proposal aims to address this uncharted territory by systematically tuning the super base in a well-defined metal complex by changing one atom at a time. The systems proposed here offer the opportunity to switch one atom, without perturbing the rest of the support, and thus allow them to probe its bonding and r