Chris Holmes

A material older than hydrogen hype, pointed at the future

Open a hydrogen fuel cell and you will find a thin, black, fibrous sheet doing unglamorous, essential work. That sheet is the kind of thing Chris Holmes ships for a living.

As President and CEO of AvCarb Material Solutions, Holmes leads a Lowell, Massachusetts company that designs and manufactures engineered carbon - fabrics, felts, and papers built for the harsh, acidic, high-temperature insides of electrochemical systems. The headline products carry unglamorous names: gas diffusion layers, molded graphite laminates, carbon felt. The roles they play are anything but. They move reactant gases, conduct electricity, resist corrosion, and hold their shape where most materials give up.

In October 2025, AvCarb put a marker down with FLEX-GDL, an ultra-thin flexible gas diffusion layer engineered for fuel cells, electrolyzers, hydrogen production, and CO2 utilization. It ships in widths up to 800 mm and rolls up to 1,000 linear meters, and it strips out roughly 80% of the PTFE used in standard layers. Holmes framed the launch in plain terms of capability rather than hype.

That is the through-line of his tenure: carbon that does a specific, demanding job, made to be manufactured at scale. AvCarb is not chasing the spotlight of the clean-energy story. It is making the layer the spotlight depends on.

Consider what a gas diffusion layer actually has to do. It sits between the flow channels and the catalyst inside a fuel cell or electrolyzer, and it must perform several contradictory jobs at once - let reactant gases pass through evenly, carry electrical current with low resistance, wick water away so the cell does not flood, and survive an environment that is by turns acidic, alkaline, hot, and mechanically compressed. Get the porosity wrong and the cell drowns. Get the conductivity wrong and the efficiency drops. The reason a company can build a 60-year business on a thin black sheet is that the sheet is far harder to make well than it looks.

FLEX-GDL is a tidy illustration of where Holmes is pushing. By cutting PTFE loading by roughly 80% and delivering the material as a continuous, flexible roll rather than rigid plates, AvCarb is aiming squarely at manufacturability - the unglamorous bottleneck that decides whether clean-energy hardware can be built by the millions instead of the thousands. Low compressibility, strong electrical conductivity, and corrosion resistance are the headline specs. The quieter story is roll-to-roll production at scale.

One material, many lives

AvCarb's carbon turns up in places that have nothing in common except the demand for performance under stress.

Relative emphasis, illustrative - drawn from AvCarb's stated application areas.

Holmes is a hybrid by training and temperament. At MIT he studied Systems Design and Management - a program built for people who refuse to pick between the engineering and the enterprise. He took the lesson literally.

His career reads as a tour of high-technology turnarounds: businesses spanning start-up scale to more than $200 million in annual revenue, much of it inside private-equity portfolios where the brief is rarely gentle. Along the way he held leadership roles at Systron Donner, H Equity Partners, Actalent, and Steiner eOptics before taking the helm at AvCarb. The pattern is consistent - complex technical products, multi-location operations, and the unglamorous discipline of making them work as companies.

It is a useful background for AvCarb, a roughly 41-person firm with outsized technical reach. The company sits inside a market - the electrochemical energy transition - where the demand curve is steep and the materials science is unforgiving. Running it well means understanding both the chemistry on the line and the math on the spreadsheet.

There is also an ownership dimension to the brief. AvCarb was acquired by Arsenal Capital Partners in 2021, positioning the carbon maker as a platform for the growth of hydrogen fuel cells, electrolyzers, flow batteries, and adjacent industrial markets. That is exactly the kind of private-equity-backed, growth-and-execution mandate Holmes has spent his career working inside. The job is not only to invent good carbon - it is to turn a heritage materials business into a scalable supplier for a market that wants more of everything, faster.

Betting that the future is electrochemical

The thesis is simple to state and hard to execute: as the world electrifies and decarbonizes, it will need more fuel cells, more electrolyzers, more flow batteries - and every one of them needs engineered carbon inside.

Holmes's aim for AvCarb is to put its materials at the center of that transition while advancing sustainable energy technology. The company's stated mission is to provide high-quality carbon that solves difficult problems through close partnership with the engineers designing thermal, friction, and electrochemical systems. FLEX-GDL is one answer; the roadmap implies more.

It is a quietly ambitious place to stand. Not the headline product, but the layer the headline product cannot live without.

The breadth of AvCarb's catalog is part of the hedge. Carbon felts and high-surface-area electrodes feed redox flow batteries, the long-duration storage technology utilities increasingly eye for the grid. Carbon papers and gas diffusion layers serve fuel cells and electrolyzers. Wet friction materials and drag washers carry the company's older industrial heritage into motorsports, marine, and even fishing tackle. One materials platform, many markets - so the company is not betting the firm on a single application of a single technology arriving on schedule.

For Holmes, that diversity is also a management problem worth having. It means the chemistry, the customers, and the qualification cycles differ across the portfolio, and a 41-person company has to be disciplined about where it points its R&D. The throughline he keeps returning to in public is capability - the ability to develop and deliver a continuous portfolio rather than a single hero product. In a field crowded with announcements, that is a notably operational way to talk about carbon.

The clean-energy transition is often told as a story of big shiny objects - turbines, panels, battery packs, hydrogen plants. The less told story is the supply chain of unglamorous components that decide whether those objects work, last, and can be built at volume. Gas diffusion layers, graphite laminates, and carbon electrodes live in that second story. They are specialized enough that only a handful of companies worldwide make them to the required tolerances, and AvCarb is one of them.

That scarcity is the strategic asset Holmes inherited and is now trying to grow. Hydrogen electrolyzers need GDLs and porous transport layers. Fuel cells for trucks, trains, and stationary power need them too. Redox flow batteries - the leading candidate for cheap, long-duration grid storage - need high-surface-area carbon electrodes that can be activated for fast, reversible electrochemistry. Each of these markets is forecast to scale through the decade, and each one runs on the kind of engineered carbon AvCarb has been refining since before most of these applications existed.

There is a neat symmetry in that. A company that cut its teeth on friction and thermal carbon - the stuff of clutches, brakes, and high-heat industrial parts - turns out to have spent decades building exactly the competencies the electrochemical age demands. Holmes's task is to make sure that competency reaches the market as products, on time, at a quality customers can design around. It is the least cinematic job in clean energy, and one of the most necessary.