The growing environmental concerns and public outcry across the world have motivated the search for alternative production pathways for basic chemicals from sustainable sources of carbon. The valorization of biomass-based ethanol (EtOH) is attractive as it can be facilely converted to basic chemicals of industrial relevance such as acetaldehyde (AcH), ethylene, propylene, 1,3-butadiene (BD), isobutene, etc. The demand for BD, which is critical in the production of synthetic rubber, adhesives, etc., is projected to reach 15 million metric tons in 2023 due to the explosive growth of the automobile industry. The increasing imparity in its demand and supply beyond the capability of the conventional naphtha cracking has led researchers to explore and optimize the on-purpose production of BD. Exploiting EtOH for the same comes with numerous advantages such as its increasing availability, industrialized production, investment, and good carbon economy. ETB follows a complicated sequence of multiple steps, which can be achieved either by a one-step process developed by Lebedev or a two-step process developed by Ostromislensky. The former process requires a higher temperature and a specific balance between EtOH and AcH to obtain a higher yield of BD.