How can we decarbonize carbon fiber toward NetZero scenarios?
Preview
The planet is warming because CO₂ keeps piling up faster than nature clears it. By 2050, the goal is to stop adding to that pile: whatever's left has to be balanced out. That's a NetZero scenario. Getting there means decarbonizing everything, including the materials that build the clean alternatives, carbon fiber included. A material doesn't get a pass just because it helps decarbonize something else. Decarbonizing an industry is never just a technology problem, either: the cleaner process has to exist, the industry has to adopt it, and adoption only happens when the financing makes sense. Technology, adoption, financing: each depends on the last.
How do we get to net zero? That's what NetZero2050 is for: a model built at EPFL's Laboratory for Processing of Advanced Composites (LPAC), simulating scenarios for the carbon fiber industry and showing which ones actually reach net zero by 2050 (hence the name). A cleaner production route, a different way of making or recycling the fiber, can look good on paper and still lose to industry growth. And a promising technology stays just a technology if nobody can justify paying for it.
The model links three things. How much carbon fiber the transition will actually demand, across six markets from aerospace to hydrogen storage. How much CO₂ each production or recycling route emits. And what it would cost to switch to a cleaner one, and whether that pays off. Judging a pathway on real numbers, not a hunch, is the model's whole aim. The cost side is still being finalized, so it isn't on the poster yet.
Trusting those numbers meant checking how they were built. NetZero2050 has been developed over four years by successive students, and complex models developed across multiple student cohorts inevitably accumulate technical debt. So a large part of my summer went into auditing the codebase: tracing the calculations, fixing bugs, and adding features it didn't have. The biggest addition tracks how much a kilogram of recycled carbon fiber loses in quality each time it's recycled (each "generation"), instead of assuming it performs like brand-new material.
What the model finds once demand, emissions and cost come together, what correctly modeling recycled fiber changes, and how far there still is to go, is on the poster.
Hi everyone,
I'm an undergraduate Materials Science student at EPFL. Alongside engineering, I've picked up some economics and law, mostly because I wanted to understand not just how something works technically, but what it takes for it to actually get used.
As a Laidlaw Scholar, I'm building a simulation model of the global carbon-fibre value chain, looking at realistic, costed paths to net zero by 2050. It touches materials, energy and finance at once, which is the kind of problem I like working on.
I try to take leadership seriously, mostly as following through on what you're responsible for. I co-led a water management project in Nyon that got funding from the Rotary Club and was implemented with local authorities, worked on a documentary about migration policy, debated in Model United Nations, and tutor students.
I also spent nine months travelling, which made me more comfortable in unfamiliar situations. Outside the lab, I'm usually in the mountains or with a camera.
Always glad to talk about anything.
Cheers!
