Carbon Green, a company based in Slovakia, asserts it has cracked the code.

http://thechemistrysideoftheforce.blogspot.com/

For decades tire companies and would-be entrepreneurs have been searching for a way to process discarded tires by using a technology known as pyrolysis. Such a solution is considered the holy grail of tire recycling.

While technically feasible, tire pyrolysis – a process in which tires are subjected to heat in an oxygen-starved environment and converted to gas, oil and carbon char – has been inhibited by the high capital investment required and steep operating costs, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Now Carbon Green, a company based in Slovakia, asserts it has cracked the code.

In a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Carbon Green said it had developed an economically viable method for processing scrap tires using pyrolysis.

The company, which has raised about $75 million from its management team and investors, already has a commercial-scale tire processing plant operating in Cyprus and is scouting locations for two factories in the United States.

“We’re doing something no one else can do,” John Novak, Carbon Green’s president, said in an interview.

Mr. Novak said Carbon Green’s crucial breakthrough was a nano-scale refinement process that upgrades carbon char, which has limited marketability, to a cost-competitive replacement for carbon black, a common reinforcement material used in car and truck tires.

The company says its carbon black substitute has been tested and deemed suitable by Cooper-Standard Automotive and Matador and that it has signed a 20-year “take or pay” contract with a major Indonesian rubber producer for the purchase of the material.

Sound too good to be true? Michael Blumenthal, vice president of the Washington-based Rubber Manufacturers Association thinks so. He said he was “incredulous” about the prospect that Carbon Green will have a significant impact on the tire market.

“They’re going to have to prove it,” he said.

Major tire companies like Goodyear and Firestone once invested “immense resources” in pyrolysis but could not find markets for the byproducts or even a way to integrate them into their own products, Mr. Blumenthal said.

And scores of start-ups have tried and failed to make money from tire pyrolysis. “The road is littered with the carnage of people who were trying to make this technology viable,” he said.

Still, Carbon Green’s ambitious goal is to roll out 17 tire processing plants over the next five years, each with the capability of processing about five million tires per year. It also wants to use the exhaust gases and oil that are byproducts of the tire processing to generate electricity for its plants and sell excess power to the grid.

Its other planned sources of income include tipping fees from the acceptance of tires, revenue from the sale of steel harvested from the tires, and the sale of carbon credits. (The company is a liquidity provider on the Chicago Climate Exchange).

And profitability will not be dependent on any green-tech financing from governments, Mr. Novak said.

“The greenness of this is a nice coincidence,” he stated. “But the business works without any subsidies.”