, a Russian chemist, was the first to polymerize
butadiene. The Russian chemist
Sergei Vasilyevich Lebedev was the first to polymerize
butadiene in 1910. In 1926 he invented a process for manufacturing butadiene from ethanol, and in 1928, developed a method for producing polybutadiene using
sodium as a
catalyst. The government of the Soviet Union strove to use polybutadiene as an alternative to natural rubber and built the first pilot plant in 1930, using ethanol produced from potatoes. The experiment was a success and in 1936 the Soviet Union built the world's first polybutadiene plant in which the butadiene was obtained from petroleum. By 1940, the Soviet Union was by far the largest producer of polybutadiene with 50,000 tons per year. Following Lebedev's work, other industrialized countries such as Germany and the United States developed polybutadiene and SBR as an alternative to
natural rubber. In the mid-1950s there were major advances in the field of
catalysts that led to the development of an improved versions of polybutadiene. The leading manufacturers of tires and some
petrochemical companies began to build polybutadiene plants on all inhabited continents; the boom lasted until the
1973 oil crisis. Since then, the growth rate of the production has been more modest, focused mainly in the
Far East. In Germany, scientists from
Bayer (at the time a part of the conglomerate
IG Farben) reproduced Lebedev's processes of producing polybutadiene by using sodium as a catalyst. For this, they used the trade name Buna, derived from
Bu for
butadiene,
Na for sodium (natrium in Latin, Natrium in German). Although the
Goodrich Corporation had successfully developed a process for producing polybutadiene in 1939, the U.S. federal government opted for the use of Buna-S to develop its synthetic-rubber industry after its entry into the World War II, This method proved to be much better for tire manufacturing than the old sodium polybutadiene. The following year,
Firestone Tire and Rubber Company was first to produce low
cis polybutadiene using
butyllithium as a catalyst. The relatively high production costs were a hindrance to commercial development until 1960 when production on a commercial scale began. and Goodrich were the first to produce plants for high
cis polybutadiene, this was followed by oil companies like
Shell and chemical manufacturers such as Bayer. Initially, with plants built in the United States and France, Firestone enjoyed a monopoly on low
cis polybutadiene, licensing it to plants in Japan and the United Kingdom. In 1965, the Japanese
JSR Corporation developed its own low
cis process and began licensing it during the next decade. The 1973 oil crisis marked a halt to the growth of synthetic rubber production; the expansion of existing plants almost ceased for a few years. Since then, the construction of new plants has mainly taken place in industrializing countries in the Far East (such as South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and China), while Western countries have chosen to increase the capacity of existing plants. In 1987, Bayer started to use neodymium-based catalysts to catalyze polybutadiene. Soon thereafter other manufacturers deployed related technologies such as
EniChem (1993) and
Petroflex (2002). In the early 2000s, the synthetic rubber industry was once again hit by one of its periodic crises. The world's largest producer of polybutadiene, Bayer, went through major restructuring as it was troubled by financial losses; between 2002 and 2005 it closed its cobalt-polybutadiene plants in Sarnia (Canada) and Marl (Germany), transferring their production to neodymium plants in Port Jérôme (France) and Orange (USA). During the same time, the synthetic rubber business was transferred from Bayer to
Lanxess, a company founded in 2004 when Bayer spun off its chemicals operations and parts of its polymer activities. == Polymerization of butadiene ==