Bolder gaining momentum with circular carbon black, pyrolysis oils

BOULDER, Colo.—Bolder Industries Inc. is on a roll.

More specifically, the 12-year-old company is gaining momentum on a circular path, one that is helping its customers close their own sustainability loops.

With its carbon black and pyrolysis oils recovered from scrap tire feedstocks, Bolder's products are in high demand from companies in the rubber and petrochemical industries today.

"This is what our go-to-market strategy has always been about," Tony Wibbeler, founder and CEO of Bolder Industries, told Rubber News. "We are not a magic bullet. We are a tool to be used toward circularity."

Bolder's more sustainably produced carbon black and pyrolysis oils are being touted by major customers as viable additives—and in some cases one-for-one replacements—to furnace blacks and oils.

"This is exactly the type of business innovation our industry needs," said Luiz Polimeno, global purchasing director with Pirelli Tire. "We can maintain our current collection routes, have insight into our end-of-life tires and have an opportunity to work directly with our current suppliers to purchase sustainably sourced raw materials for our manufacturing."

Other companies—Carlisle, BASF, Patagonia, PPG and Tokai Carbon—have taken notice with testimonials, given what Wibbeler says is Bolder's quality and consistency.

"One of our big growth drivers is around collaboration with others," he said. "Bolder Industries is built to help make people's lives a little bit better. We want to help them improve sustainability, improve their margins and hopefully improve their product performance.

"This is a good time for us. We are making good strides."

Bolder's unique process takes feedstock scrap tires and uses 98 percent of the material from each tire, with about 75 percent of the solids and liquids extracted from the recycled tires making their way back into new tires, manufactured rubber products and plastics.

Bolder says the process uses 96 percent less CO2, 98 percent less water and 61 percent less energy.

Like any other process that requires heat, tire pyrolysis remains energy-intensive.

Materials "mined" from the breakdown—using a suite of processes, including pyrolysis—include, from one tire, gas (10 percent); oil (BolderOil, 40 percent); carbon black (BolderBlack, 33 percent); and steel (15 percent), according to Bolder.

The gas is reused on-site, and the steel is sold to recycling companies in that space.

Bolder's rCB and rCB oil remain its bread-and-butter commodities.

"We are finding our way into a number of different places and markets," Wibbeler said. "Our consistency has opened up a lot of oil markets. It was always our goal to focus on both BolderOil and BolderBlack.

"To get both right is tricky on a commercial scale, and we have been doing that since February 2019."

Bolder Industries' headquarters are in Colorado, but its BolderBlack and BolderOil are produced in Maryville, Mo.

A second reactor has been added to Bolder's production plant in Maryville, and the plant is producing about 6,000 metric tons of recovered carbon black and 8,000 metric tons of pyrolysis oil per year.

The company since has turned its attention to continued retrofits and expansion of its 66,000-sq.-ft. Terre Haute, Ind., facility, which Bolder purchased from Pyrolyx USA Indiana in December 2021.

Phase I of this project has three reactors to break down scrap tires, and the facility "is piped for a fourth."

Investments from Bolder for the western Indiana facility are estimated at $55 million, Wibbeler said, and about $25 million has been spent thus far.

"This was a good location, and they already had a finishing line that was similar to our finishing line in Maryville," he said. "But it has required more commissioning and engineering than we thought. We are making meaningful adjustments to that piece to make it work."

Some of the rCB that is produced in Maryville is shipped to Terre Haute, where it is refined further through a jet mill (which Maryville does not have), allowing for smaller rCB particle sizes.

"This gives us a new advantage we did not have before," Wibbeler said.

The plan is for Terre Haute to be fully commissioned next year, with a capacity from its four reactors (in phase II) of about 10,000 metric tons of rCB per year and 15,000 metric tons of BolderOil per year.

Between Maryville and Terre Haute, Bolder estimates it will eliminate about 30,000 metric tons of scrap tires (and some non-tire rubber scrap) annually as feedstock for its products.

In addition, big things are happening in Antwerp, Belgium, as the company plans to launch an identical project to Terre Haute there in the coming years.

"Antwerp will be a duplicate of Terre Haute," Wibbeler said. "The scaled-up reactor we put in Maryville is now kitted ... it is no longer a Rube Goldberg design. Terre Haute will get four reactors the same as Maryville's (single, scaled-up reactor), and the same blueprint will be used in Antwerp."

"It is completely duplicatable."

Wibbeler offered that two more projects in the U.S. "will be announced shortly."

Bolder, which has about 70 employees, estimates it will top out at close to 300 people once all three plants are operational.

With a mission to significantly reduce landfill material (mainly via the diversion of scrap tires); drastically cut emissions, water and energy usage; and create local jobs in an emerging industry, Bolder's goals are, well, bold.

The company splits its net sales evenly between BolderOil and Bolder Black.

"The oil side has been very interesting recently," Wibbeler said. "We have opened up a lot of markets on that side—some pretty big markets—with some pretty good diversification."

One of the biggest markets in the U.S. is Bolder's collaboration with virgin carbon black producers like Tokai Carbon Co. Ltd., to provide ISCC-certified CB oil to make virgin CB.

If this sounds like Bolder is selling its rCB to its vCB competitors, Wibbeler is quick to note that's not the case.

"Years ago people told me I was crazy to do this ... but it turned out pretty well," he said. "Other people might see it that way (as competition) ... I do not.

"I look at it as we are built from the same cloth. In the 1950s and 1960s they were taking waste oil products and turning it into other products.

"We are doing something very similar, just as they did with fossil fuels."

Since the rCB that Bolder produces and the vCB that legacy CB companies manufacture are not one-for-one replacements (at least typically), legacy companies can use Bolder's material as a performance additive, boosting the properties of the vCB with a mix of both.

"If you can blend rCB and vCB ... they now have allocations for new volumes they would not have had before," Wibbeler said. "They are terming that 'sustainable virgin black.' "

Bolder does sell its BolderBlack and BolderOil directly to customers as well as a plug-and-play, though the materials more often are mixed in both cases.

"There is a reason there are more than 40 grades of ASTM black and thousands of specialty grades. Our's is one of those," Wibbeler said.

On average, Bolder Industries has about a 30-percent replacement rate with its customers in their vCBs.

"Sometimes people take it easy and they start at a 10-percent blend rate and then move up from there," Wibbeler said.

BolderOil is a bit different in that the oil itself is feedstock for vCB production, though it, also, is often mixed.

Bolder has two condensed cuts of oil that can be blended back together. The company does not use a distillation tower.

"BolderOil provides some uniqueness," Wibbeler said. "It requires less heating and there are cleaning agents inherently in it that can assist with some applications. We are very complementary to these businesses in many ways."

One of those applications is in the solvents market, with fracking well clean-up efforts for paraffin wax, and asphaltene mitigation.

Of course, the draw for Bolder's products is the entire package, as its products allow for performance enhancements, certainly. But they also serve to reduce the CO2 footprints of its customers.

Bolder's partnerships, specifically with Pittsburgh-based Liberty Tire Recycling L.L.C., which will supply Bolder's scrap tire feedstock for Terre Haute, remain at the core of its operations.

Just don't call Bolder a tire pyrolysis company—or a tire recycling company for that matter.

"We don't consider ourselves a tire pyrolysis company ... that represents maybe 25 percent of the steps in making business happen in a circular fashion. People who sell that technology can use that branding, and that's fine," Wibbeler said.

"And we are not a tire recycling company—Liberty Tire does that.

"Pyrolysis is an important step in the process, but each piece is important—the feedstock preparation, material handling, shipping and branding all are critical.

"What we are is a circular economy business. We are demonstrating that the financial pro formas work. We are demonstrating in real life and on a real commercial scale that our products work and our financial expectations are in line.

"And that really is what we do and who we are."

Outside of Bolder Industries, Orion Engineered Carbons, Monolith, Birla Carbon and Cabot Corp. are some of the other major CB suppliers who produce sustainable CB at some readiness level between pilot programs and industrial production.