Calgary firm aims for carbon fibre with a lower cost for customers and the environment
November 7, 2025
As thin as a strand of human hair but four times stronger than steel, carbon fibre is in everything from aircraft parts to bicycles to hockey sticks to golf clubs.
Although it is significantly lighter, carbon fibre is a lot more expensive than steel. The Canada West Foundation pegged the cost of industrial carbon fibre at $7 per pound in 2023, down from $35 two decades earlier. But aerospace-grade carbon fibre can cost up to $120 per pound. That’s still far higher than steel, which is about $1 per pound.
Most carbon fibre is currently produced using a chemical compound called polyacrylonitrile (PAN), which is derived from a component of natural gas. China is the world’s largest producer.
A company founded by two University of Calgary researchers has shown promising results in its goal to produce a more affordable carbon fibre using bitumen byproducts produced by Alberta’s oil sands.
And in doing so, CarboMat CEO and co-founder Shabab Saad says the company will produce a product with the potential to lower emissions as well.1
“The biggest competitive advantage of our process is it produces carbon fibre that is 60 per cent cheaper than current commercial products,” says Saad.
A 2023 University of Alberta study asserts that life-cycle emissions from carbon fibre derived from oil sands bitumen are 69 per cent lower than PAN-based products. CarboMat uses asphaltenes and other byproducts derived from bitumen produced in Alberta’s oil sands, as its primary feedstock.
Saad and CarboMat co-founder and scientific director Md Kibria began researching how to use bitumen to produce carbon fibre as a research project at the University of Calgary.
“We received $50,000 from Alberta Innovates through the Carbon Fibre Grand Challenge in 2020. This is a competition to help researchers develop their ideas into commercial production of carbon fibre from bitumen-derived feedstocks. That grant helped us with the first step on this journey,” says Saad. “We’ve since received more than $5 million in grants from provincial and federal funding agencies to help get us to this point of trying to scale into semi-commercial or commercial production.”
CarboMat’s technology was developed using bitumen byproducts supplied by Pathways Alliance member companies.
Unwanted materials, such as clays, salts, sand and sulphur, are removed first in a pretreatment process. The treated bitumen byproduct is then fed into a reactor, where it is heated and pressurized. It is then fed through a spinner that produces a thin filament. That thread goes through subsequent processes that increase the carbon content from a range of 70 to 82 per cent up to 95 to 99 per cent.
“We are very confident we can maintain our advantages we have documented in producing carbon fibre as we scale up,” says Saad. “Our goal post pilot is to build a semi-commercial or commercial facility to begin production that will start operations by no later than Q2 2028. A commercial facility would produce 2,000 tonnes a year, while a semi-commercial facility would have between 25 and 50 per cent of that capacity.”
The support of Pathways Alliance members has been crucial to CarboMat, Saad says.
“Since we first came into contact with the Pathways members in 2022, they have been engaged in helping us succeed, whether it has been helping mentor us, providing us with feedstock, helping us find experts in the advanced materials space,” Saad says. “There have been a lot of important in-kind contributions. When we wanted to speak with the right people, made the right connections, just facilitated us with the whole process.”
While Pathways has not provided direct funding to CarboMat, the company did receive a $1.3 million grant from Emissions Reduction Alberta in 2024. Those grants are funded through Alberta’s Technology Innovation Emissions Reduction Fund. Pathways Alliance member companies provide payments to that fund through the province’s carbon pricing and emissions trading system.
“We are really excited to be involved in creating something that creates a value-added product from low-value bitumen byproducts with the potential to help Alberta and Canada with decarbonization,” says Saad.
