Carbon-Black-Market

The disposal of 280 million tires generated each year in the U.S. is a great environmental problem. The tires take up large amounts of valuable landfill space and also present fire and health hazards. Tire-pyrolysis plants have been in operation for years, but the economics are poor, and most of these facilities have been shut down. This is mainly due to the low value of the end products, which are usually fuels (oil, pyrolysis gas, char). It is believed that reprocessing of waste tires into value-added products would improve the economic leverage. This study addresses reprocessing of oils derived from waste-tire pyrolysis into carbon black - a valuable feedstock for the manufacture of tires, other rubber products, paints, pigments, ink, powder coating, toner, etc. Such a process would form a recycling loop for the carbon black recovered from waste tires. The objective of this work was to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach in a laboratory scale. More specifically, the goal was to show that carbon black produced in the furnace process (1) using waste-tire oil as a feedstock could possess similar characteristics as the carbon black made from a traditional petroleum-based feedstock. Materials and Experimental Techniques Four oil samples were used in this study: (a) tire-pyrolysis oil prepared at Advanced Fuel Research, Inc. (AFR) in a two-inch diameter packed-bed reactor; (b) tire-pyrolysis oil obtained from a large-scale tire pyrolysis plant operated by Conrad Industries in Chehalis, Washington; (c) tire-pyrolysis oil obtained from a pilot-scale tire pyrolysis facility operated by Metso Minerals (formerly Svedala) in Danville, Pennsylvania; and (d) Exxon bunker oil provided by Caleb Brett. The highly aromatic Exxon oil is a typical high-grade feedstock that carbon-black manufacturers use in their normal operations. This oil was used as a reference for the tire-derived feedstocks. In addition, a sample of the AFR tire oil (a) that had been aged for two years was examined to determine oil stability during extended storage at ambient temperature and pressure.