Bridgestone Americas (Bridgestone) received a grant from the US Department of Energy (DOE) Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office. Bridgestone will design, build and operate a pilot plant that will advance an innovative, potentially more sustainable and cost-effective approach to obtaining butadiene from ethanol. The project will evaluate the economic and commercial viability, as well as the carbon footprint, of converting ethanol to butadiene.

The company plans to utilize the butadiene produced to further study and confirm the potential use as a feedstock for raw materials in Bridgestone tires.

Bridgestone has partnered with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) for this project. The process will utilize and scale an innovative and proprietary catalyst system originally developed by PNNL and further co-developed through research activities with Bridgestone.

It is this unique catalyst combined with Bridgestone’s innovative process engineering that holds the promise of establishing a commercially viable new way of thermochemically converting ethanol to butadiene.

Butadiene is a key ingredient in tires today and typically represents the Nº 1 ingredient (by volume) in synthetic rubber that is derived from fossil fuels. The goal of this project is to assess, and hopefully prove, the economic viability of deriving butadiene from ethanol conversion versus fossil fuel conversion. If the economics prove viable, then low carbon intensity ethanol (or ethanol derived from bio-based or recycled materials) could replace the use of fossil fuels in the process to obtain butadiene.

The project officially starts this month and will span at least three years:

• Year 1 – Design of the pilot plant

• Year 2 – Build the pilot plant (Akron, Ohio)

• Year 3 – Staff and operate the pilot plant