Oxocarbon anion

There are however a large number of stable anions in this class, including several ones that have research or industrial use.

There are also many unstable anions, like CO−2 and CO4−, that have a fleeting existence during some chemical reactions; and many hypothetical species, like CO4−4, that have been the subject of theoretical studies but have yet to be observed.

Stable oxocarbon anions form salts with a large variety of cations.

Most oxocarbon anions have corresponding moieties in organic chemistry, whose compounds are usually esters.

The carbon atom has 4 pairs of valence electrons, which shows that the molecule obeys the octet rule.

With valence bond theory the electronic structure of the carbonate ion is a resonance hybrid of 3 canonical forms.

The correspondence is not always well-defined since there may be several ways of performing this formal dehydration, including joining two or more anions to make an oligomer or polymer.