In previous parts of this multi-part series, Paolo Bomben, director of Bitumen Beyond Combustion (BBC) at Alberta Innovates, identified asphalt binder as the BBC product having “the greatest potential of achieving commercial success” in the short and longer term, and energy carbons and carbon fibre as the two with the greatest potential in the longer term but with technological hurdles still to jump to achieve this potential.

To support the needed technological advancements to jump these hurdles to economically produce carbon fibre from bitumen-derived feedstocks, Alberta Innovates launched its $26-million, three-phase Carbon Fibre Grand Challenge (CFGC) in January 2020 through its BBC initiative.

In December, it announced the five Phase III winners of the competition — among 13 applicants — sharing $15.2 million in prize money.

It should be noted that Alberta Innovates was the sole funder for Phase I of the CFGC but worked with partners to fund Phases II and III. The Clean Resource Innovation Network (CRIN) was a co-funder of Phase II and Emissions Reduction Alberta (ERA) is a co-funder of Phase III.

Here, in Part 4 of the series, two of the five Phase III winners are profiled, Calgary-based CarboMat Inc. and a team from the University of British Columbia (UBC) led by Yasmine Abdin, a professor in the Department of Materials Engineering.

To learn more about the technologies they are developing, the potential of their low-cost carbon fibre production to expand markets for it, and their roadmaps to commercialization, DOB Energy interviewed Shabab Saad, chief executive officer and co-founder of CarboMat, and the leader of the UBC team Abdin.

Technologies and their advantages

Figure 1

“Our technology entails a multi-step process involving asphaltene pre-treatment, melt modified melt spinning, and post-spinning treatments,” said CarboMat’s Saad (see Figure 1). “Currently, we have a gram-scale prototype up and running to meet the needs of our ongoing and future R&D projects,” which is producing medium-grade carbon fibre at this time.

Abdin’s team is at a similar state of technological advancement, also with a gram-scale prototype, but it produces two types of carbon fibre, at least one of which is of higher quality. “We have developed two different carbon fibres from bitumen using our proprietary spinning processes, including the regular-sized micron-scale carbon fibres and new nano-scale carbon fibres,” Abdin said.

The key advantages of the technologies being developed by CarboMat and Abdin’s team are also similar, production of relatively low-cost, low-emissions carbon fibre using a low-value feedstock.

“The key advantages of our technology include the ability to reduce the production cost of carbon fibres by 60 per cent and reduce the associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of carbon fibre production by 50 per cent, relative to the conventional PAN [polyacrylonitrile]-based carbon fibre technology,” Saad said (see Figure 2).

Figure 2

He noted the company’s technology is suitable for adoption in the existing carbon fibre value chain, “thus creating more value for our customers through integration of old and new technologies.

For her part, Abdin highlights the cost and environmental advantages of using bitumen as a feedstock.

“Our bitumen-derived carbon fibre technologies provide a pathway for low-cost, high-performance fibres for cleantech but reduce the carbon footprint of carbon fibre production,” she said.

Market expansion

According to Saad, just a 50 per cent reduction in the cost for precursor — which presently accounts for about half the total cost — will increase global consumption of carbon fibre from around 150,000 tonnes per year to one million tonnes/y by expanding current markets and opening “at least five to seven different, new markets” (see Figure 3).

Figure 3

“This is exactly where CarboMat barges in and provides an alternative solution to these customers for broader utilization of carbon fibres for their low-to-intermediate quality products,” he added.

Abdin noted: “Reducing the cost of carbon fibre production expands their feasibility in sectors like automotive and transportation, promoting lightweighting and improved fuel economy. Our technology breakthroughs also pave the pathway for adopting carbon fibres in new markets like energy storage and batteries.”

Particular applications for low-cost carbon fibre, according to Abdin, include: electromagnetic shielding for battery cases; conductive filaments for battery anodes; 3-D printed carbon fibre reinforced components; and higher strength and stiffness multifilament yarns for structural composites in automotive, wind turbines, and other critical sectors.

Saad said CarboMat’s short-term beachhead is most likely sports or automotive, depending on the potential market share and how the reinforcement of its ongoing collaborations with multiple stakeholders evolves.

“As we continue to improve the quality of our carbon fibres, we envision gaining traction in high-end markets as well, such as aerospace, wind energy, and pressurized compartments,” he said.

“Due to the high production costs of commercial PAN-based carbon fibres, carbon fibre markets have been poorly served historically as they struggle to afford and utilize carbon fibres in large volumes for their commodity products.”

Road to commercialization

The timelines for CarboMat and Abdin’s team to achieve large-scale commercial production from their carbon fibre technologies appear similar, with their Phase III CFGC projects — to be completed by the end of 2026 — an important steppingstone for each, while the UBC team has one important additional step in the interim.

“We are currently aiming to launch our spin-off company by the end of 2024 and are planning to commercialize the technology by the end of Phase III in 2026 with a gradual market entry leveraging the partnerships we have with potential end-users in automotive, pipelines and other sectors,” Abdin said.

“In Phase III, we aim at scaling up our carbon fibre production from gram scale to kilogram scale and producing product prototypes with our end-user partners, [while] first commercialization efforts will begin at a pilot production scale of around 15 tonnes/year with the aim of manufacturing prototypes in the targeted sectors,” she added.

“We hope to eventually ramp up production to 1,500 tonnes/year [from a single production line]. This is possible due to the abundance of supply of bitumen in Canada, presenting a strong market opportunity in advanced manufacturing.”

On the CarboMat front, it will “take approximately six more years of technology de-risking and extensive R&D before going commercial, which is a quintessential characteristic of any hard technology business,” Saad said.

“Out of the six years, almost three years would be dedicated towards scale-up, R&D, and minimum viable product (MVP) development in the CFGC Phase III project, followed by another three years of technology scale-up, de-risking, and R&D before going fully commercial.”

Throughout the duration of CFGC Phase III project, CarboMat’s goal is to increase its carbon fibre production capacity and demonstrate consistency, uniformity, and reproducibility in larger scale, Saad noted.

“By the end of Q4 2026, we expect to have our kilogram-scale asphaltene-derived carbon fibre production unit fully operational to facilitate product development and meet the needs of our customers in our constantly growing pipeline.”

In terms of achieving large-scale commercial production, “the standard capacity of a commercial carbon fibre production line is approximately 2,000 tonnes/year, and the capacity of our first commercial production unit would be no different,” Saad said.

“To achieve carbon fibre production at this rate and considering a conservative production yield of 60 per cent, we would require approximately 3,400 tonnes of asphaltene supply every year to support a single carbon fibre commercial line. The amount of asphaltenes needed to support this is equivalent to an extremely small fraction (less than one per cent) of the total volume of asphaltenes available in Alberta.”