Zeon Corporation and Yokohama have announced an agreement to establish a bench facility to demonstrate technology for producing butadiene from ethanol derived from plant-based and other sustainable materials with high efficiency.
The facility will be installed at Zeon’s Tokuyama Plant (in 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.
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 outline 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 will develop a prototype polybutadiene rubber (butadiene rubber) from the butadiene produced at the bench facility, and Yokohama will develop prototype tires using the butadiene rubber and conduct driving tests using the tires to collect data needed for a more large-scale demonstration of the technology.
