Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

Two Volunteer State entities are participants in two of the 49 projects that were awarded a total of $171 million from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to reduce industrial greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and accelerate the development of innovative decarbonization technologies.

• Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations LLC in Nashville received one of the largest awards – $9,284,066 – for a project with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). The effort will demonstrate an ethanol to butadiene (EBT) process enabled by a novel catalyst developed by PNNL where end-of-use tires can be turned into ethanol to produce butadiene, which can then be used to make new tires.
• The University of Tennessee, Knoxville is one of several partners in a $1,450,000 award to the University of California, Riverside for a project designed to optimize Co-solvent Enhanced Lignocellulosic Fractionation (CELF) technology into a more environmentally sustainable alternative to traditional kraft pulping. CELF is a previously developed low-cost mild-severity solvent-based pretreatment method. Specifically, the project focuses on optimizing the production of dissolving pulp used in the manufacturing of extruded textile fibers. CELF utilizes an aqueous co-solvent that will be combined with an oxygen delignification process for elemental chlorine-free pulp production.

DOE’s announcement noted that the projects come from 21 states. Sixteen will be led by private industry, 22 by academic institutions, three by non-profit organizations, and eight by national laboratories. In addition, DOE also announced that applications are open for an $83 million funding opportunity to decrease emissions from hard-to-decarbonize industrial sectors, which represent roughly 30 percent of total U.S. carbon emissions.

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