WOOSTER, Ohio — Ohio State University’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) and the Ohio BioProducts Innovation Center (OBIC), along with other university and industry partners, have been awarded a $3 million Third Frontier Wright Projects Program grant to develop a renewable, domestic source of natural rubber that is expected to create new industries and jobs by bringing together the state’s agricultural and rubber-products sectors.
The grant — awarded on a competitive basis following an extensive commercial and peer-review process — was announced on June 26 by Ohio Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher, chair of the Ohio Third Frontier Commission. Funding is contingent upon State Controlling Board approval.
“We are very pleased to be involved with this transformational project to develop a source of natural rubber that can be produced in Ohio,” OARDC Director Steve Slack said. “Ohio has a long, proud tradition in the production of quality rubber products that impact every facet of our transportation industries. We can visualize the next-generation rubber source being both homegrown and home-refined.”
Project partners include Akron-based Delta Plant Technologies (which initiated the project in 2005), the University of Akron, Bridgestone Americas Center for Technology and Research, and Cooper Tire & Rubber Company. Also involved are Oregon State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
The source of rubber being domesticated at OARDC’s Wooster campus is a type of dandelion, Taraxacum kok-saghyz (TKS), native to the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Commonly known as Russian dandelion, TKS produces high-quality natural rubber in its fleshy taproot, comparable in performance to the latex extracted from the only commercially available source of natural rubber today: the Brazilian rubber true, Hevea brasiliensis.
But while rubber from Hevea trees, grown almost exclusively in southeast Asia, is the industry standard, businesses and researchers see an immediate need for an alternative, domestic source of this material that the U.S. Congress has recognized as “strategic” for both manufacturing and defense.
The reasons, Delta Plant President Bryan Kinnamon said, are increasingly undeniable.
“The United States depends on 100-percent imported natural rubber, whose price has increased almost seven-fold since 2002, costing the country $3.3 billion a year,” Kinnamon pointed out. “Additionally, natural-rubber supplies are becoming increasingly unstable as a result of rapidly expanding growth in China and India, decline in rubber production due to industrialization in Southeast Asia, and increasing utilization of this material by former Soviet Bloc countries. Estimates indicate that demand will exceed supply in 2020 by approximately 15 percent.”
Natural rubber is essential for the U.S. economy and national security because it provides performance characteristics not available from synthetic, petroleum-derived rubber, explained Stephen Myers, director of OBIC — an Ohio State-based center created through another Third Frontier award in 2005 to boost collaborations between Ohio’s two largest industries, agriculture and polymers (http://bioproducts.osu.edu/).
“North America consumes 2.7 billion pounds of natural rubber, 80 percent of which is used in tires,” Myers said. “Trucking, construction and aviation tires require a high percentage of natural rubber to meet performance characteristics, making natural rubber critical to these industries as well as to the U.S. strategic defenses. Aircraft tires, for example, require nearly 100 percent natural rubber to meet heat tolerance and required adhesion specifications.”
TKS as a producer of natural rubber has an interesting history. It was first found to be a viable source of rubber by the Soviets in the 1930s, and during World War II the USDA conducted a feasibility study of the plant for possible production in 28 states, including Ohio, and developed an extraction process. But the project was abandoned following the liberation of rubber tree-producing regions from the Japanese and advances in synthetic rubber production.
More than 60 years later, however, the Russian dandelion’s time may have finally arrived. And this time, rubber is not the only strategic resource this lawn-weed look-alike could provide us — researchers have also found it to be an excellent source of ethanol.
Matt Kleinhenz, a crop scientist with OARDC and OSU Extension, is leading the domestication and rubber-yield enhancement of TKS plants in Ohio. Beginning with seeds brought from native TKS-growing regions, Kleinhenz and his team identified numerous individuals that can produce 15 or more pounds of rubber from every 100 pounds of dry roots. Selection of promising individuals from wild-collected seed continues, but Kleinhenz’s team is also working to develop superior lines and varieties through breeding.
“Long-term, traditional breeding methods and modern genetic approaches will be integrated in order to continually raise the performance of the newly formed TKS crop, just as similar integration has been done for other crops,” explained Kleinhenz, an associate professor in the Department of Horticulture and Crop Science. “Improved growing and harvesting methods developed by Ohio State and its partners will also be a key to the success of the new TKS-based industries.”
Tests of rubber produced from TKS in Wooster by the University of Akron’s Goodyear Polymer Center have found the material to be of comparable quality to Hevea rubber.
But that’s not all. Forty-five percent or more of TKS dry matter is comprised of inulin, a naturally occurring carbohydrate that’s increasingly being used as a food additive and can also be turned into ethanol similar to the way this biofuel is produced from corn.
“Basically, TKS will provide two products: rubber and inulin,” said Fred Michel, an associate professor in the Department of Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering with both OARDC and OSU Extension, whose team is in charge of extraction and processing techniques for the Russian dandelions. “Estimates indicate that ethanol can be produced from TKS byproducts for significantly less than the cost of corn-based ethanol.”
The Third Frontier grant will help partners in this project conduct validation and qualification of Russian dandelion rubber by industrial users for a range of applications, but focusing on Ohio’s leading tire industry. Most of the $3 million will go toward building a pilot-scale processing facility on OARDC’s Wooster campus that will generate 20 metric tons of rubber a year for industrial testing.
Delta Plant envisions Ohio will have the first module of a TKS commercial facility in place by 2013. This plant will be expanded to 60 million pounds of natural rubber annually by 2015. Rubber-processing facilities will be located near the areas where TKS is grown, much like the corn ethanol model. Inulin, Kinnamon said, would be sold to existing ethanol plants in the region as a low-cost ethanol feedstock.
“This project has been possible thanks to the fact that we have the state’s best polymer and agricultural research centers right here in northeast Ohio,” Kinnamon highlighted. “It’s a match made in heaven.”
For more information about the Russian dandelion rubber project, log on to the Program of Excellence in Natural Rubber Alternatives’ (PENRA) website, http://www.oardc.osu.edu/penra).
The Ohio Third Frontier Wright Projects Program (http://www.thirdfrontier.com/) provides grants to support specifically defined near-term commercialization projects requiring major capital acquisitions and improvements at Ohio colleges and universities and non-profit research institutions. Projects must involve one or more Ohio companies and be in the areas of advanced materials, power and propulsion, information technology and instruments, controls, and electronics.
OARDC and OSU Extension are the research and outreach arms, respectively, of Ohio State’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences.
