The Hydrogen Plant Whose Real Product Is Tire Black

Out on the prairie south of Lincoln, Nebraska, sits an industrial building that looks like every other chemicals plant in the Midwest. The difference is what comes out of it. From one set of pipes flows hydrogen. From another flows carbon black: the matte, oily powder that gives a passenger tire its grip and its color. Same starting molecule, separated. Same plant, both products sold to the same buyer.

The plant is Monolith Materials’ Olive Creek 1, the world’s first commercial-scale methane pyrolysis facility. It was running on grid power and natural gas in 2020, well before the Inflation Reduction Act made every spreadsheet in the energy industry start with the word “hydrogen.” Goodyear announced a supply agreement with Monolith in December 2021 and shipped its first tire with Monolith carbon black in May 2023. The US Department of Energy added a conditional $1.04 billion loan guarantee. And on November 17, 2025, ExxonMobil and BASF signed a joint development agreement to build a demonstration plant of their own at Baytown, Texas.

Methane pyrolysis is the hydrogen color the press releases barely mention. Green hydrogen (electrolysis from renewables) and blue hydrogen (steam methane reforming with CO₂ capture) get the headlines. The chemists, mostly, are working on turquoise: splitting one molecule of CH₄ into one of solid carbon and two of hydrogen, using electricity instead of steam, with no water, and with the carbon coming out as a salable solid rather than a CO₂ stack emission. Since January 2023, the US Patent and Trademark Office has granted 44 utility patents in this space, to 24 distinct assignees, deploying at least seven mechanically different reactor designs. None of them produce CO₂.

One molecule, seven physics

What makes this a real convergence rather than a buzzword pile-up is that the patents pass the deletion test. Strip the phrase “methane pyrolysis” from every grant and you still get patents describing the same reaction: natural gas in, heated without oxygen, hydrogen out one side and solid carbon out the other. What varies is how the heat gets in.

Plasma torch. Monolith Materials has 22 US grants since 2020, most of them refinements of an electrical-arc torch that rips methane apart at over 1,800°C. US11939477, granted March 2024, describes a closed loop in which unreacted hydrogen is preheated and recycled into the plasma reactor as the working gas. US12144099, granted November 2024, updates the torch geometry.

Microwave. Aurora Hydrogen, an Edmonton spinout led by University of Toronto combustion researcher Murray Thomson, holds US12145846 (November 2024). The trick is that methane is microwave-transparent but solid carbon is not. The reactor preheats a bed of carbon with microwaves; the carbon then thermally cracks the incoming methane. No catalyst. No oxygen. No water. Aurora’s Series A was led by Energy Innovation Capital with checks from Shell Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures, and Williams.

Iron-ore catalyst. Hazer Group, listed on the Australian Stock Exchange and spun out of the University of Western Australia, uses raw iron ore as a methane-cracking catalyst between 600 and 1,000°C. US12357973, granted July 2025, claims a process for tuning temperature and pressure to control the morphology of the graphite coming out. Hazer’s pitch isn’t hydrogen, it’s high-grade graphite for battery anodes and steelmaking, with hydrogen as the lucky byproduct. In May 2025, the company signed a scale-up alliance with the engineering firm KBR.

Pulsed combustion. Ekona Power, based in Burnaby outside Vancouver, burns a small slug of methane to flash-heat the rest. US12012333, granted June 2024, describes the control loop: measure carbon and hydrogen output, then adjust the fuel-to-oxidant ratio above or below the stoichiometric range depending on which product is missing. The reactor talks back to the operator. In January 2024, Ekona deployed a one-tonne-per-day pilot at ARC Resources’ Gold Creek gas plant in Alberta.

Molten metal. This lineage traces back to a 2017 Science paper out of UC Santa Barbara: Upham, Agarwal, Khechfe, Snodgrass, Gordon, Metiu, and McFarland, “Catalytic molten metals for the direct conversion of methane to hydrogen and separable carbon.” A 27% nickel, 73% bismuth alloy in a 1.1-meter bubble column hit 95% methane conversion at 1,065°C, and the carbon, insoluble in the liquid metal, floated to the top where it could be skimmed off. McFarland spun out C-Zero in 2018, backed by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Eni, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

Distributed thermocatalytic. Modern Hydrogen of Bothell, Washington (formerly Modern Electron) holds US11897768, granted February 2024, for on-site pyrolysis units that crack natural gas to hydrogen before it reaches a customer’s existing burner. The carbon ships out by truck. An existing pipeline customer becomes a hydrogen producer without moving a single pipe.

Fluidized bed. ExxonMobil’s two molten-media pyrolysis patents from February 2023 (US11591212 and US11577955) are close corporate readings of the McFarland approach. Then in July 2025, Exxon was granted US12358788, “Methane pyrolysis using stacked fluidized beds,” in which coke particles flow counter-current to the methane through a stack of reactors. The geometry is borrowed from oil refining. Four months later, the Baytown joint development agreement with BASF was announced: a demo plant capable of 2,000 tonnes of hydrogen and 6,000 tonnes of solid carbon per year, on land Exxon already owns.

Why the carbon is the point

Hydrogen made by methane pyrolysis uses roughly five times less electricity than hydrogen from water electrolysis, according to ExxonMobil’s own number. It uses no water, which matters if your refinery sits in the Permian Basin or the eastern Saudi desert. And the existing natural-gas network already runs to most of the world’s industrial sites, so the hydrogen can be dropped in front of an ammonia plant or a steel mill without laying a new pipe.

But the reason the economics actually close is that the carbon is not waste. Carbon black is a roughly $25 billion global market and about 15 million tonnes per year, of which 70% goes into rubber tires. A typical consumer tire is up to 20% carbon black by weight. Today most of it is made by burning heavy oil in giant smoke-belching ovens, a process essentially unchanged since the 1910s. Monolith’s plant makes the same product, with no CO₂, on grid electricity. Goodyear expected to take roughly a third of Monolith’s expanded Olive Creek output.

Hazer is aiming at a different carbon market. Graphite for EV battery anodes and steelmaking is currently dominated by Chinese supply, and the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism is about to start charging tariffs based on embedded emissions. Hycamite, a Finnish startup, is targeting carbon nanofibers and CNTs. The choice of carbon morphology, from fluffy carbon black to dense graphite to tubular CNT, is set by the reactor temperature, catalyst, and residence time. Every patent in the space is, in part, an attempt to claim a slice of the carbon byproduct market.

What the convergence means

The methane pyrolysis idea is not new. Nazim Muradov at the University of Central Florida’s Florida Solar Energy Center published the foundational proposal in 1998, “CO₂-Free Production of Hydrogen by Catalytic Pyrolysis of Hydrocarbon Fuel,” now cited 282 times. He has spent the last twenty-seven years methodically demonstrating that the chemistry works and the industry would not pay attention. What changed wasn’t the chemistry. It was cheap renewable electricity to drive the heat input, the IRA’s hydrogen production credit (which methane pyrolysis qualifies for at a tier between blue and green), and a clarifying realization in petrochemical boardrooms that if hydrogen becomes a real commodity, they would rather sell it from their existing methane pipelines than watch it get made from water by someone else.

ExxonMobil’s molten-media pyrolysis patents predate the public BASF partnership by nearly three years. Chevron Phillips’ US11958745, granted April 2024, describes using methane pyrolysis specifically to decarbonize the tail gas of an existing hydrocarbon cracking system: turn a refinery’s own waste methane into the hydrogen the refinery already needs. SABIC and Saudi Aramco have similar grants. The patents say what the press releases don’t. The hydrogen industry the petrochemical majors are quietly building is one that never leaves their existing molecule.

For an R&D director or a corporate venture investor, the takeaway is uncomfortably specific. The hydrogen technologies that have gotten press for four years (PEM, alkaline, and solid-oxide electrolyzers) all assume electricity is the input. Turquoise hydrogen assumes methane is. If Baytown runs as advertised, the hydrogen plant of 2030 looks a lot less like a row of electrolyzers next to a solar farm, and a lot more like a small chemical plant attached to the gas line, selling rubber filler out the back door.

Method note

Patent counts come from US Patent and Trademark Office utility-grant records, restricted to grants published between January 2023 and September 2025 whose claims or abstracts describe methane (or natural-gas) pyrolysis to hydrogen and solid carbon. Assignee counts collapse variant spellings and parent-subsidiary filings where they could be matched by name. Foundational citation counts come from the OpenAlex literature corpus. Carbon black market figures are 2025 estimates from Grand View Research and Fortune Business Insights. Funding details and the November 17, 2025 ExxonMobil-BASF joint development agreement come from the companies’ own press release; the Goodyear-Monolith collaboration dates come from Goodyear’s December 2021 and May 2023 announcements.