Texas company bringing green, bacteria-based rubber production to Akron

CEO Dave Witte is bringing his company to Akron, where he says it will employ billions of workers to produce a key ingredient used to make rubber—green, sustainable rubber, no less.

Not billions of people, though some of those will also be needed. Witte’s company, Bioverde, of Texas, will employ single-celled bacteria, known as methanotrophs, which feed on methane. They’re found in nature, and Bioverde is using a genetically modified version of them for which it holds patents. 

“That’s what they eat—they eat methane. It’s technically called an aerobic fermentation of methane,” Witte said. 

What’s important about these organisms, he said, is they consume methane and produce Butanediol as waste. That’s used to make Butadiene, a chief and expensive ingredient in most common types of rubber.

He’s got three compelling reasons to come to Akron, he said: It’s close to Appalachian shale gas, which will serve as his feedstock and is some of the least expensive natural gas anywhere; the area has numerous companies in the rubber and tire business that are his likely customers and partners, as well as world-class academics focused on rubber and plastics; and he’s just won a portion of the region’s $51 million in federal sustainable polymer hub to be part of the local polymer cluster.

Witte said the advantages of being close to the Utica and Marcellus shale gas regions are the same for his company as they are for companies that use natural gas to make other products, like ethane.

“It’s kind of like why the Shell cracker is there as well,” he said, referring to Shell’s huge ethane cracker across the Ohio River in Pennsylvania. 

Witte declined to say how much he’s getting in grant funding but did say his company is getting one of the larger grants in that $51 million package. Those individual grants, of which there are five, range from $2 million to $12 million, according to the Greater Akron Chamber, which won the funding with a regional effort backed by a cluster of local polymer-related companies. 

Bioverde, which has only 10 employees, will keep its headquarters in Texas but plans to move its operations to the Akron area, Witte said. 

“This grant has enabled us to essentially move the operations to Ohio. ... It’s still going to be a Texas-based company, but all our work will be done in Akron,” Witte said.

He said his company has found a spot for its local administrative and research work but isn’t ready to say where it is yet. It’s only a few thousand square feet though and is only a tiny fraction of what he ultimately plans to build in town. 

“It’s going to be a big plant. It will be acres when it gets to scale,” Witte said.

The technology is already proven, he said, and was about to go into production four years ago when COVID hit, shuttered his operations and put the project on hold. Now, with the pandemic over and the boost of federal funding, is the perfect time to restart the effort, he said. 

“Now, we are basically bringing it back out of hibernation and redeploying it,” Witte said. 

Witte said the process his company uses will produce Butadiene at one-third of the cost of what companies such as Goodyear and other tiremakers pay today. The big tire companies were aware of the project in 2020 and remain very interested, he said.

Goodyear, for one, confirmed it’s watching the early-stage company.

“We are aware of the company, assessing the potential and are excited to attract new materials companies to the greater Akron area,” Goodyear Vice President for Global Communications Doug Grassian said via email. 

It’s not a complicated process to explain, Witte said. 

Bioverde puts its proprietary organism into water and then bubbles methane and oxygen into the water so the bacteria have something to eat and can breathe — similar to what a bubbler in an aquarium does for fish, Witte said. 

The organisms feast on the methane and multiply and as they do that, they create Butanediol as a waste product.

The bacteria are then filtered from the water and dried, after which they are processed into animal feed that is especially popular in the aquaculture industry, which feeds them to fish, Witte said. 

The Butanediol is then removed from the water and can be easily converted to Butadiene, which is then used to make rubber.

It could have huge potential for the rubber industry because Bioverde says its process can produce Butadiene for far less than it costs to make it today, which would dramatically reduce the cost of making tires, 

“We end up with a product that’s a third the cost of what it would be with petroleum-based production … and we do it carbon neutral,” Witte said.

He said Bioverde also has an edge over some competing technologies, on the sustainability front, because other processes rely on other feedstocks.

“They’re usually starting with a carbon source like Corn, which is part of the food supply,” Witte said.
This isn’t going to happen overnight. Witte said it will likely take a few years before Bioverde scales up to the point where it can do commercial production.

But the production is very scalable, he said, in part because it’s operated as a continuous process rather than having to be done in batches. 

Witte ultimately envisions a large outdoor facility with multiple vessels and production lines producing Butadiene.

He’s got bigger plans than just making Butadiene, too. Bioverde plans to develop and use other microorganisms that will make other chemical products, Witte said.

Witte is no stranger to the chemical industry, either. A chemical engineer himself, before 2019 he spent seven years with IHS Markit, a well-known international data firm for which he was executive vice president for the energy, chemicals and agriculture markets. 

Witte said he doesn’t think it will be difficult to raise the capital he needs to expand once Bioverde is ready.

“I’ve been doing this a long time and a lot of it was dealing with project finance,” Witte said. “This should not cause too much worry from the investment-banking side … when you have the margins that come with our cost advantage, you have a lot of wiggle room.”