In the 1960s and 1970s, the Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics and the Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry developed new technologies for the oxidative dehydrogenation of butene to produce butadiene and for the nickel-catalyzed synthesis of butadiene rubber.

Since then, 20 10,000-ton-class nickel-catalyzed butadiene rubber (NiBR) production units have been built in China, with a production capacity of 1.5 million tons.

This technology allowed China to independently industrialize butadiene rubber. It also brought the country’s technology for producing synthetic rubber from petroleum gas and refinery gas to an advanced world level.