Brazil’s biofuels sector has long been anchored in ethanol, but mounting pressure to decarbonize aviation and diversify feedstocks is shifting attention toward less conventional pathways.
One of the structural constraints facing sustainable aviation fuel markets is feedstock availability, particularly for routes such as HEFA that compete for limited lipid resources. Against this backdrop, Houston-based Cemvita and Radix are advancing front-end engineering for a circular bio-oil project in Brazil that targets crude glycerin, a byproduct that has historically struggled to find consistent, high-value uses.
Crude glycerin is produced in large volumes alongside biodiesel, yet its impurity profile often limits downstream applications, depressing its market value. Cemvita’s biomanufacturing platform is designed to convert this low-value stream into a bio-oil that can be upgraded into drop-in refinery feedstocks, including pathways compatible with HEFA-based SAF production. The technical premise is not incremental yield improvement but feedstock expansion, addressing a bottleneck that has constrained SAF scale-up even as policy demand accelerates.
The current phase centers on translating a process proven through pilot and scale-up work into an industrial configuration that aligns with real operating constraints. Radix’s role has been to pressure-test assumptions that often remain abstract at the technology development stage, including equipment selection, utilities integration, and layout optimization. According to the companies, this alignment between biological performance and industrial design is intended to reduce execution risk, a recurring challenge for novel biofuel technologies that fail to bridge laboratory performance with plant realities.
Brazil’s relevance to the project is both structural and economic. The country operates one of the world’s largest biodiesel industries, creating a geographically concentrated glycerin supply. By designing the facility to integrate with existing biodiesel assets, the project aims to minimize greenfield complexity while improving capital efficiency. Cemvita reports that adapting a U.S.-designed concept to Brazilian conditions reduced the projected cost per ton of bio-oil by nearly 40 percent, largely through local equipment choices, infrastructure synergies, and utilities integration. While the specific cost baseline has not been disclosed, the scale of the reduction highlights how localization can materially alter project economics.
From a decarbonization perspective, the appeal of the pathway lies in carbon intensity rather than volume alone. Glycerin is already embedded within the biodiesel lifecycle, and upgrading it into bio-oil for SAF or co-processing routes can improve overall system efficiency without introducing new agricultural inputs. This approach aligns with broader efforts to lower lifecycle emissions by extracting additional value from existing biomass streams rather than expanding land use.
The project’s replicability is a central design objective. Both companies frame the engineering work as a template that could be deployed across biodiesel facilities, allowing producers to convert a waste or low-margin stream into a strategic input for advanced fuels. This modularity could prove critical if SAF demand continues to outpace the availability of conventional lipid feedstocks, particularly in regions with established biodiesel infrastructure.
Commercial timing remains a key variable. The partners are targeting a final investment decision in 2026, placing the project within a window when global SAF mandates and incentives are expected to tighten, but financing conditions for capital-intensive biofuel assets remain selective.
