Innovation: Ultra-Low Carbon Hydrogen Glass
Award Category: Design: Environmental Impact Design, 2025 CAMX ACE finalist
Company: Owens Corning
Objective: The products are single-end roving and wet-use chopped strands made through a low carbon melting process that replaces natural gas with hydrogen created from hydroelectric power.
Results: The combustion of hydrogen yields H2O instead of CO2 resulting in glass fiber with significantly reduced CO2 emissions.
Impact: Early internal estimates show that through this process, we are able to reduce onsite emissions by up to 95% compared to current glass fiber manufacturing processes.
From the Expert: Paul Salach, Product Leader, Owens Corning: “Starting in January at our L’Ardoise, France facility, we’re going to be operating off 75% green hydrogen. Since there’s a hydroelectric dam about a mile away, we’ll be taking water from the river and using an electrolyzer that’s on site to separate the H2 from the O. We’ll use the oxygen for combustion in our manufacturing process and then the hydrogen for melting, and the net impact of that will be a very significant decrease in our on-site greenhouse gas emissions.”
“I think sustainability a lot of times can be seen as a cost or a challenge. We see it as an opportunity to grow the composites industry. At the end of the day, we’re all competing against traditional materials. We’re really leveraging the opportunity to be leaders in lower embodied carbon as a way to grow the industry and ultimately lead to more adoption of composite materials.”
“It’s fun to try and make the world a better place through coming up with new products, but also, I think there’s a lot of really cool opportunities for innovation. Being able to work with things like hydrogen where it’s a completely new fuel source, and locally available, it’s exciting. And then similarly with circularity. There’s all this science that goes into how we make composites. Now, how can we start to split them apart and get the core materials back to their original manufacturing?”