The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company supports the development and use of sustainable material technologies in its products. Over the last several years, Goodyear has had success in the development of soybean oil technologies and use of them in key tire product lines. This project, titled “Development of Tire-Grade Carbon Black from Soybean Oil” was initiated because of the drive for enhanced sustainability in reinforcing carbon black, a key ingredient used in tires from a technical perspective and a high-volume material, with its use in every component and the total content approaching 15% of the weight of an average passenger tire. Carbon black provides increased strength, tear resistance, and abrasion resistance, among other properties to a rubber compound. Typically, though, the production of carbon black is performed through the incomplete combustion of a petroleum or coal-tar based feedstock but there are opportunities for the use of alternative bio-based, bio-circular, and/or circular feedstocks, such as soybean oil, to enhance the material sustainability. The goal of the project was to develop a commodity tire-grade carbon black produced from soybean oil feedstock that could match the performance of an existing ASTM tire-grade, produced from the traditional feedstocks. In FY2024 we have made significant progress on our key project deliverables. In FY24 we have completed a scaled-up production run of an N326-type carbon black produced from 100% soybean oil feedstock with our carbon black manufacturing collaborator, resulting in multiple metric tons of product available for testing and trials. This was a significant milestone for the project and proved that this could be done on a large-scale. The availability of this large-scale sample then allowed Goodyear to complete a substantial amount of both traditional and advanced raw material characterization work on the carbon black as well as compound evaluations in many critical applications compared to an N326 made from the traditional petroleum feedstock. Significant progress was made in FY24 to allow for the technology to progress further to commercial-scale and testing to be completed in tires.

This project represents a significant potential benefit to US soybean farmers due to the high volume of tire-grade carbon black produced and used in the United States. The selected grade of carbon black is a high-volume, industry standard, commodity grade of carbon black that is critical to the performance of many tires on the market. For every kilogram of carbon black produced roughly 1.7-2 kilograms of oil feedstock is required. The use of soybean oil as the feedstock is expected to result in slightly lower yield, at least initially, resulting in an even higher need for soybean oil compared to petroleum-based feedstock for the same amount of carbon black production. If you consider that the average consumer tire is about 15 wt.% carbon black, the volume potential is quite large. With the goal being to match the performance of the petroleum-based product currently in use, the more sustainable product made from soybean oil could easily be adopted across multiple existing product lines (assuming performance equivalency can be achieved), representing a tremendous opportunity for carbon black manufacturers, tire manufacturers, and US soybean farmers, alike.