Doping an oxide with H2SO4 results in a sulfated oxide. These materials are used in heterogeneous catalysis and as a weakly coordinating supports for organometallics. 10 Sulfated zirconium oxide (SZO) contain sulfates, pyrosulfates, and Brønsted acid sites. Sulfation would also presumably increase electrophilicity at Zr that is expected to increase rates in heterolytic C-H bond activation reactions. 12 However, there is limited evidence that SZO can activate a C-H bonds in alkanes by a heterolytic mechanism in Figure , and most proposals assume Brønsted sites on SZO protonate C-H bonds to form carbocations. Two notable exceptions to this trend involve reactive pyrosulfate sites. Butane reacts with pyrosulfates on SZO to form butenes, H2O, SO2 and sulfate. Similar redox reactivity of pyrosulfate sites was also proposed in the chemistry of Cp*IrPh(Me)(PMe3) with sulfated alumina that forms products through a formal H-atom abstraction from the Cp* ligand. Pyrosulfate is the acid anhydride formed from sulfate and SO3, the latter is a very strong Lewis acid. In the proceeding sections we will show that SZO contains very strong Lewis sites that we propose are derived from pyrosulfate opening to transient SO3 and sulfate on the ZrO2 surface. The Lewis acidic SO3 interacts strongly with common Lewis basic probes and mediates reversible hydride abstraction from hydrocarbons to produce carbocations. This reactivity enables SZO to mediate chain cleavage in reactions with neat isotactic polypropylene (iPP) and high-density polyethylene (HDPE) melts in the presence of H2. These reactions are also initiated by hydride abstraction to form carbocations that undergo bscission reactions to form cleaved products. Using available heterolytic C-H bond strengths alkanes that form carbocations on SZO, combined with the calculated energies for carbocation formation on a transient SO3 site, we estimate that the hydride ion affinity between 226.2 to 237.9 kcal mol -1 , the largest value reported for a neutral Lewis acid.