Chemical Bonding: O2 Lewis Structure

Drawing the Lewis Structure for O₂

Viewing Notes:

• For the Lewis Structure for O₂ you're going to need a double bond in order to for each Oxygen atom to have an octet. That's the only way you can make it work with the twelve valence electrons available.
• Be sure that you don’t use more than the tweleve valence electrons available.

Transcript: OK, we're going to do the Lewis dot structure for O2. Let's start. Looking on the periodic table, we can find Oxygen in group 6 or 16, and that means it has 6 valence electrons. But we have two of them so we'll multiply that by 2. That gives us a total of 12 valence electrons. We're going to distribute those valence electrons around the atoms, the Oxygen atoms.

So we draw one Oxygen, and another Oxygen. And let's put two between here to form a chemical bond. So we've used 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12. We've used 12 valence electrons, what we have to use. Let's see if we have an octet, or 8 valence electrons. For that Oxygen, 2, 4, 6, 8; that's fine. But for this Oxygen, we only have 2, 4, 6. Not an octet, and that's not going to be stable. What we can do is, we can take two of these electrons here and move them between the Oxygens.

So now let's see what happened with our octet. Two, 4, 6, 8; that's fine. And then over here, 2, 4, 6, 8. That also has an octet. And we have 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12; twelve valence electrons, just like we started with. Everything's good: our octets are satisfied, we've used all the valence electrons. If we want to write it out in a structural formula, we can take and write it like this, where this double bond right here represents these two pairs of electrons.

This is Dr. B., and thanks for watching.