Kingsport Gets Thirty Percent, Longview Gets a Milestone

A federal award died on May 30, 2025, and came back on October 29, 2026, the same size and pointed somewhere else.

DOE cancelled 24 Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations awards that day in 2025, roughly $3.7 billion of commitments, and Eastman's $375 million for a molecular recycling plant at Longview, Texas was on the list. Eastman shelved Longview.

Seventeen months later the award is back, and the project behind it has been rebuilt from the ground up (chart below).

"What does a reinstated grant actually add to US recycled polyester supply, and when?"

The answer sits closer to you than a greenfield would have.

The Scope Moved Inside an Operating Plant

The updated scope raises output at the existing commercial-scale methanolysis facility at Kingsport, Tennessee by approximately 30%, through debottlenecking and technology advancements.

Rep. Diana Harshbarger's office and the trade coverage carry the same number and the same mechanism, so the figure is firm.

The base it applies to is not. Neither Eastman nor DOE has published a current nameplate for the Kingsport unit, and the third-party tonnages floating around disagree with each other by enough to matter, so the only honest way to carry this is as a percentage.

What the percentage tells you is still useful. A debottleneck of a running unit shows up as more of a product stream your qualification file already covers, at a site your auditors have already walked, on a schedule set by turnaround windows rather than by permits and steel.