Materials firm Zeon Corporation and Yokohama Rubber Co have agreed to establish a pilot facility to demonstrate technology for producing butadiene from ethanol derived from plant-based and other sustainable materials. The facility will be based at Zeon’s Tokuyama Plant (Shunan City, Yamaguchi Prefecture) and is scheduled to begin operating in 2026.
It will enable the production of a certain amount of butadiene and facilitate the collection of various data that will be used to establish mass production.
This initiative is aligned with one of two R&D themes selected by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organisation (NEDO) in 2022 for its project for developing raw materials using biomass or CO2, one of NEDO’s Green Innovation Fund Projects.
As part of a cooperative effort headed by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), National University Corporation Institute of Science Tokyo (formerly Tokyo Institute of Technology), and the national research and development agency RIKEN, Zeon and Yokohama Rubber are aiming for the social implementation of two technologies that will enable the production of butadiene and isoprene from plant-based and other sustainable materials in the 2030s.
The bench facility to be installed at the Zeon plant is part of initiatives based on the theme “highly efficient butadiene synthesis using ethanol.” The demonstration experiment at the new bench facility will demonstrate the technology to convert ethanol obtained from plant-based and other sustainable materials into butadiene using a highly efficient catalyst.
It will be the first step in establishing the technology’s use for the mass production of synthetic rubber from plant-based and other sustainable materials.
Zeon adds it will develop a prototype polybutadiene rubber (butadiene rubber) from the butadiene produced at the bench facility, and Yokohama Rubber will develop prototype tires using the butadiene rubber and conduct driving tests using the tyres to collect data needed for a more large-scale demonstration of the technology.