Wheels Blog: Bridgestone Investing in Potential North American Source for Rubber

United States Department of Agriculture Guayule.

PHOENIX — Bill Niaura jokes that his title is director of new business development because his employer, Bridgestone Americas, does not include “guayule farmer” among its corporate job descriptions. Nonetheless, the company is investing millions of dollars to determine if a plant that is native to the North American desert may provide a new source of the natural rubber needed for tires.

That plant is guayule, which is pronounced why-YOU-lee.

None of the world’s supply of natural rubber is produced within the United States, or anywhere in North America. The world each year harvests nearly 11 million tons of natural rubber, which comes from the white sap of a species of Hevea trees that grow only in equatorial areas. Ninety-three percent of that supply comes from Southeast Asia, 4 percent from Africa and 3 percent from South America, Mr. Niaura told members of the Phoenix Automotive Press Association during a presentation last month on Bridgestone’s new Arizona-based guayule research project.

Guayule is a woody shrub native to the deserts of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. Bridgestone’s research shows that the rubber guayule produces can be substituted for the rubber from the Hevea tree. The company says it believes that the potential yield per acre may be even greater once the plant is domesticated for agricultural production. Mr. Niaura’s task is to lead the research teams and determine if a viable business case can be made for guayule as a significant source of rubber.

That research will be done in two locations.

Last year, Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations bought 281 acres of land near Eloy, a town between Phoenix and Tucson. The company will use that land as a guayule agricultural research center. Each flower that blooms on a guayule plant produces five seeds, Mr. Niaura said, but only one of those seeds contains a viable embryo to start a new plant.

The company is ready to break ground at a corner of the former General Motors desert proving grounds in Mesa for a research center for extracting the rubber and other resources from guayule plants.

Mr. Niaura, who has a graduate degree from the University of Akron in polymer sciences and has worked for Bridgestone for 20 years, said only about 7 percent of the plant’s mass was natural rubber and a business case must be made for using the rest of the plant as well. Some of that mass, he said, is a pine-tarlike resin that can be used by the adhesives industry. The remaining biomass could simply be burned to produce energy. Mr. Niaura said the biomass had the same energy density as coal, but with the benefit of being carbon neutral.

Bridgestone hopes to have a pilot crop growing at Eloy by 2015.