Tetravalence

In chemistry, a tetravalence is the state of an atom with four electrons available for covalent chemical bonding in its valence (outermost electron shell). An example is methane (CH₄): the tetravalent carbon atom forms a covalent bond with four hydrogen atoms. The carbon atom is called tetravalent because it forms 4 covalent bonds. A carbon atom has a total of six electrons occupying the first two shells, i.e., the K-shell has two electrons and the L-shell has four electrons. This distribution indicates that in the outermost shell there are one completely filled 's' orbital and two half-filled 'p' orbitals, showing carbon to be a divalent atom. But in actuality, carbon displays tetravalency in the combined state. Therefore, a carbon atom has four valence electrons. It could gain four electrons to form the C anion or lose four electrons to form the C cation. Both these conditions would take carbon far away from achieving stability by the octet rule. To overcome this problem carbon undergoes bonding by sharing its valence electrons. This allows it to be covalently bonded to one, two, three or four carbon atoms or atoms of other elements or groups of atoms. Let us see how carbon forms the single, double and triple bonds in the following examples.