Carbon black goes green

Orion is to spend €12.8 million to further develop and demonstrate a climate-neutral process for producing carbon black from renewable sources. Half of the total is being funded by the decarbonisation programme of Germany’s Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action, supported by the EU’s NextGenerationEU fund.

The ‘Clean Carbon Black Research & Development Project’, as it is called is designed to improve  yield and throughput and thus potentially reduce the carbon footprint of the process “by a significant amount”. Carbon black has many uses, with tyres the most important. A research facility is being built for the project at Orion’s main innovation centre in Cologne.

Meanwhile, California-based Origin Materials has revealed that it is to receive funding from the US Department of Defense to develop samples of bio-based polymers and carbon black. This is one of nine projects receiving a total of $18.7 million under the BioMADE initiative, which seeks to aid in supply chain resiliency and sustainability goals, re-shore manufacturing jobs and enhance the domestic bioindustrial manufacturing ecosystem.