Advanced BioFuels USA

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest)  Though we usually think of diversifying away from petroleum via the fuels for our cars — what about the petroleum in the tires?  Rubber security, as it turns out, offers some of the same chills and thrills as energy security.

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(W)hy exactly isn’t the single major global source of natural rubber, the Brazilian rubber tree (hevea brasiliensis), grown commercially in Brazil? Yep, a pesky fungus took it out.

Fast-forward to today. You’re now lasered in on one reason that tire companies feel exposed to economic chaos, should just one new fungi appear that takes on rubber trees in Southeast Asia. No surprise, they’ve been working hard on alternatives.

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Natural rubber prices have been volatile too — rising to $2.80/pound in 2011 before falling to $0.77/pound last week.

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The two candidates for diversifying away from petroleum-based and hevea-based rubbers are guayule and Russian dandelion. They’ve been studied, in fits and starts that generlly conincide with supply shocks, for decades.

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The gloabl natural rubber market is 9.7 million tons and $20 billion, according to PENRA, the Ohio State-based center of excellence for research on natural rubber alternatives. In North America alone the market is 1.35 million tons of which 80% is used in tires. PENRA observes that “rucking, construction and aviation tires require a high percentage of natural rubber to meet performance characteristics making natural rubber critical to the nation’s trucking and construction industries as well as the U.S. strategic defenses. Aircraft tires require nearly 100% natural rubber to meet heat tolerance and required adhesion specifications.”

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Working jointly with industry and science, the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME established a partnership with Continental Tire in October 2013, to develop the production process over the next five years so that Continental can manufacture tires made from dandelion rubber.  The research team is building the “first ever pilot system to extract vast quantities of dandelion rubber for making tires: an important milestone on the path to rubber procurement in Europe.”

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Global demand for natural rubber is expected to outstrip supply by 20% by 2020. But KeyGene believes that the dandelion can be developed into an important natural source of the commodity, worth more than $100 billion a year.

The dandelion’s roots are smaller than ideal for commercial rubber production. So KeyGene is putting the plant through a process of plant phenotyping in order to develop a variety of dandelion with a fatter root and higher yield, that would be better suited for industrial processing.

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In the world of guayule, one of the most significant efforts has been based in a $6.9 million 2012 USDA grant to a consortoium led by Cooper Tire. The four-year grant aimed to focus on research efforts aimed at developing enhanced manufacturing processes, testing and utilizing of guayule natural rubber as a strategic source of raw material in tires, and evaluating the remaining biomass of the guayule plant as a source of bio-fuel for the transportation industry.   READ MORE