Tire & Plastic Waste
Environmental liabilities become infrastructure fuel.
PowerLink's proprietary digestion process is designed to recover steel, rubber composites, low-carbon diesel, and propane, with surplus energy intended for on-site use or export.
Scrap tires generated annually in the U.S. (addressable feedstock).[10]
Design target vs. conventional processing — internal engineering estimate, not yet demonstrated at commercial scale.
“The model: inputs others pay to dispose of become revenue-bearing outputs.”
The feedstock problem, stated plainly
Roughly 2.5 billion tires are produced globally each year, and the United States alone generates on the order of 280 million scrap tires annually — about 4.2 to 4.5 million tons [10]. A tire is engineered not to break down. That is a virtue in service and a liability afterward, and it is the reason scrap tires accumulate in monofills, stockpiles, and informal dumps rather than degrading.
A liability with a price attached
Disposal is not free. Generators pay to have scrap tires and mixed plastics taken away, which means the feedstock arrives with a payment attached rather than a purchase price. That inversion — being paid to accept an input — is the structural feature the model is built around.
Existing stockpiles are concentrated
Legacy tire dumps sit in known locations, in volumes large enough to support years of throughput at a single site. Concentration matters: it removes the collection logistics that make distributed waste streams uneconomic and lets a facility be sited against an inventory rather than a supply chain.
What the material actually contains
A passenger tire is steel belt and bead wire, natural and synthetic rubber, carbon black, and processing oils. None of that is waste in a materials sense — it is a bundle of recoverable commodities held together by vulcanization. The engineering question is how to separate them without destroying their value.
Why conventional routes fall short
Shredding produces crumb rubber and tire-derived fuel, both low-value outlets that recover little of the embedded chemistry. Higher-value recovery has historically been limited by yield, product consistency, and the energy cost of the conversion step itself — which is where PowerLink's process design is aimed.
How the digestion process is designed to work
PowerLink's digestion process is proprietary, and the description below is deliberately at the level of process stages rather than operating parameters. Everything here describes the system as designed. It has not yet been demonstrated at commercial scale, and performance at scale may differ from design intent.
Feed preparation
Incoming material is sized and, where required, separated by stream before conversion. Consistent feed is what makes downstream product quality repeatable; it is the least visible stage of the process and one of the most consequential to yield.
Thermal conversion
The prepared feed is converted in a controlled, oxygen-limited environment, breaking the polymer and rubber fractions into condensable hydrocarbons, non-condensable gas, and a solid carbon-bearing residue. Operating in a closed loop is what allows the gas fraction to be captured rather than flared.
Product separation
The condensable fraction is separated into liquid and gaseous products; steel is recovered from the solid stream; carbon-bearing solids are collected for further processing. Each output leaves as a distinct, saleable stream rather than as a blended residue.
Residual heat and on-site power
Non-condensable gas and process heat are intended to supply the facility's own load, with surplus energy available for on-site use or export. Running the conversion on its own output is what makes 'closed-loop' a description of the energy balance and not just a slogan.
PowerLink's internal engineering estimate is a 20–40% yield improvement against conventional processing. That is a design target derived from in-house modelling, not a demonstrated commercial result, and it should be read accordingly.
Products the process is designed to recover
The commercial case does not rest on any single output. It rests on the fact that one input, paid for on the way in, is designed to leave as four saleable streams plus energy.
Steel
Belt and bead wire recovered from the solid stream is a scrap commodity with established buyers and transparent pricing. It is the most straightforward output to place and the least dependent on product qualification.
Rubber and carbon composites
The carbon-bearing solid fraction is the output with the widest value range, depending on how far it is refined and what specification it can hold. Qualification for higher-value applications is a materials-science exercise, and PowerLink treats it as one.
Low-carbon diesel
The condensable liquid fraction is intended to be processed into a diesel-range product. Fuel products face specification and offtake requirements that vary by jurisdiction, and meeting them is a condition of the revenue rather than an assumption behind it.
Propane and process gas
Lighter fractions are intended for recovery as propane, with the remaining non-condensable gas used as process fuel. This is where the energy balance closes and where the facility's own power demand is intended to be met.
Why the economics are two-sided
Most industrial processes buy an input and sell an output, and the spread between them is the business. This one is designed to be paid at both ends: a tipping fee on the way in, and recovered materials plus energy on the way out. That structure changes what a downturn in any single commodity does to the facility — a fall in one output price does not remove the payment attached to the feedstock — but it does not remove commodity exposure, and it introduces its own dependency on waste-handling contracts and the regulatory treatment of those streams. Whether the intended economics are realised depends on execution, throughput, product qualification, offtake, and prevailing prices, none of which are assured.
Tire Dumps are untapped potential.
- 01Bozeman, MT
Tire Waste + BTC / AI Compute
PowerLink prospective flagship deployment site.
- 02Hudson, CO
Stranded Gas + High-DNI Solar
Co-located with a substantial on-site tire feedstock supply.
- 03Odessa, TX
Negative-Priced Stranded Gas
Waha gas has repeatedly traded negative — episodic lows creating periodic low-cost feedstock; volatile and basis-dependent.[9]
- 04Mobile, AZ
Solar
Among the highest direct-normal-irradiance corridors in the U.S. (desert Southwest).[12]
- 05Goldendale, WA
Hydro
Targeted sub-$0.04/kWh hydro — internal target, subject to PPA terms and delivery point.[12]
- 06Williston, ND
Stranded Gas + Cold-Climate
EIA / VIIRS satellite data: the Permian is the leading U.S. flaring basin; the Bakken is among the largest by flared volume.[11]