Japanese bank MUFG has agreed to purchase up to $30mn of shares in Japanese biofuels developer Euglena, which will allow Euglena to increase its share in a joint venture to build a biorefinery in Malaysia.
Euglena will issue the shares in stages via their overseas special purpose company Euglena Sustainable Investment (Esil). Esil currently owns a 5pc equity of the joint venture and plans to increase its share up to the maximum of 15pc with the new funding. The other partners are Eni's biofuels unit Enilive and Malaysian state-owned refiner Petronas' Petronas Mobility Lestari.
The biorefinery started construction in the fourth quarter of 2024, and is scheduled to start operations in the latter half of 2028. It will have the capacity to process about 650,000 t/yr of raw materials, such as used vegetable oils, animal fats, waste from the processing of vegetable oils and other biomass including microalgae oils, to produce up to 725 kilolitres/yr of SAF, hydrogenated vegetable oil (HVO) and bio-naphtha.
The biofuel developer, whose initial business was the cultivation of the microalgae Euglena for food, had previously also announced that it will put more emphasis on UCO procurement and SAF supply to domestic consumers.
Euglena aims to achieve a production capacity of 100,000 t/yr of microalgae-based oil by the 2030s, and is currently working with Petronas' subsidiary Petronas Research in a joint study to establish technology for large-scale microalgae production. But microalgae has so far faced challenges in commercialising as a biofuels feedstock, including high production costs, difficulty scaling up and low lipid yields.
