AvCarb
Material Solutions

The Elevator Pitch

A carbon company you have never heard of, inside things you use every day

Here is a slightly unfair fact about the energy transition: most of the parts that make it work are boring, and most of the boring parts are made by companies nobody talks about. AvCarb Material Solutions is one of those companies. It sits in a mill building in Lowell, Massachusetts, and it makes engineered carbon fiber - gas diffusion layers, felts, papers, woven fabrics, molded graphite laminates. If you have never bought any of these, that is fine. The people building your hydrogen fuel cell, your grid-scale flow battery and your electrolyzer almost certainly have.

The pitch is simple, which is why it is easy to underrate. A fuel cell is a stack of thin layers, and each layer has one job. AvCarb makes several of the layers where the carbon has to conduct electricity, move gas, manage water, survive heat and not fall apart for years. That is a harder job than it sounds, and AvCarb has been doing it since before most people could spell "decarbonization."

The Long Version

From Apollo to hydrogen, one thing stayed constant: the carbon

The origin story is genuinely good, and it is the kind of thing that makes an industrial historian happy. In the early 1960s the Lowell operation was part of Aviation Corp. - AVCO - a name best remembered for AVCOAT, the ablative material that helped form the thermal protection system for NASA's Apollo program. That is to say: the same lineage of carbon know-how that helped bring astronauts home through a wall of reentry heat now goes into the guts of a hydrogen fuel cell. Not many supply chains get to claim that arc.

The corporate plumbing changed a few times, as corporate plumbing does. As the operation moved into fuel cell fabrics and papers, Textron - which had come to own the business - decided to concentrate on defense and sold it to Ballard Power Systems in 2001. The AVCO name went away; the company became Ballard Material Products. But the AvCarb brand, attached to the carbon products themselves, survived. Then in 2013 Ballard sold the AvCarb brand and technology to the management team, backed by private investors. And in November 2021 the private equity firm Arsenal Capital Partners acquired the company to back its expansion into decarbonization technologies.

Here is the thing worth noticing across all that shuffling. The logo changed, the owners changed, the org chart changed. The one asset nobody let go of was the deep, specific, hard-won knowledge of how to make carbon fiber do exactly what a customer needs. That is the whole business. Everything else is packaging.

What the company actually sells

AvCarb describes itself, plainly, as a manufacturer of application-enabled carbon fiber components. In practice that means it makes a small number of product families exceptionally well and then customizes them. Its gas diffusion layers combine proprietary carbon fiber paper, a PTFE treatment and a micro-porous layer coating - and, in a nice detail, AvCarb can make those micro-porous layers either hydrophobic or hydrophilic depending on how the customer wants water to move. It makes molded graphite laminates rigid enough for the brutal chemistry of electrolyzers. It makes carbon felt - needle-punched from oxidized PAN fiber - that works as a redox flow battery electrode in one application and as furnace insulation in another.

And then, because good materials companies tend to accumulate delightfully unrelated customers, it also makes wet friction materials that automotive OEMs have trusted for more than 25 years, and carbon drag washers for fishing reels. The same fiber expertise that helps a fuel cell breathe also makes your fishing reel pay out line smoothly. This is not a contradiction. It is what depth looks like.