Eastman Texas Thermal Battery

Executive Overview

The Eastman Texas Thermal Battery is a Rondo Energy heat battery deployment at Eastman's new molecular recycling facility in Longview, Harrison County, Texas. Eastman is investing $1.3 billion to build its second U.S. molecular recycling facility at Longview (the first is in Kingsport, Tennessee, operational since March 2024). Construction is targeted for completion around 2027. The Longview facility will process approximately 110,000 metric tonnes of hard-to-recycle polyester plastic waste per year — equivalent to approximately 11 billion water bottles annually — producing new materials with up to 90% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than virgin fossil feedstocks. Eastman has been negotiating an award of up to $375 million from the U.S. DOE's Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED). PepsiCo is an early adopter committed to purchasing a significant volume of output. The facility will create over 200 full-time jobs and approximately 1,000 temporary construction jobs. Rondo's storage media production capacity is being scaled from 2 GWh per year to 90 GWh per year in parallel.

How It Works & Differentiation

Eastman's molecular recycling process breaks polyester plastics down to their molecular building blocks using pyrolysis or methanolysis, then reformulates them into virgin-quality polymers — unlike mechanical recycling, which degrades material quality and can only process clean, single-resin streams. The energy-intensive nature of molecular recycling historically required fossil-fired heat; the Rondo Heat Battery replaces that heat by storing surplus renewable electricity at temperatures exceeding 1,000°C in ceramic refractory bricks, then discharging steam on demand 24/7 regardless of renewable intermittency. The thermal battery stores heat for up to 24 hours with minimal loss, enabling continuous recycling operations powered by intermittent solar and wind inputs. This is the first application of large-scale industrial heat batteries to an advanced plastics recycling facility.

Commercialization & Traction

Eastman's Kingsport molecular recycling plant was on track to earn approximately $75 million in revenue in 2024, providing the commercial baseline that justified the $1.3 billion Longview expansion. The DOE OCED award of up to $375 million, combined with the PepsiCo offtake commitment, gives Longview a secured demand and partial federal cost-share structure. Eastman targets recycling 125,000 tonnes of polyester by 2025 and doubling to 250,000 tonnes by 2030 across both facilities combined. Eastman's overall commitment is to invest more than $2 billion in molecular recycling facilities globally, targeting carbon neutrality by 2050.

Scalability & Strategic Context

The Longview facility is within 300 miles of four of the eleven most populated U.S. cities, providing proximity to both waste feedstock and end-market customers. If the Longview deployment demonstrates that Rondo heat batteries can economically decarbonise a continuous, high-temperature molecular recycling process, it establishes a template for the broader advanced plastics recycling sector — which includes multiple operators (PureCycle, Plastic Energy, Indorama) pursuing similar facilities where thermal energy is a major cost and emissions driver. The combination of DOE cost-share, corporate capital commitment, and anchor offtake from a major consumer goods company makes this one of the most structurally de-risked industrial heat battery deployments to date.