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27 min ago 2 min read
Californian renewable fuels start-up Circularity Fuels has raised $7m to build a sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) demonstration plant that uses raw agricultural biogas as feedstock.
Within the next 18 months, Circularity aims to build and run its demonstration plant while completing the engineering design of its first 75-barrel-per-day commercial plant.
The company has not disclosed the location or planned capacity of the demonstration facility.
The seed round, led by venture capital firms DCVC and Trucks, brings Circularity’s total funding to around $17m, which includes nearly $7m in grants.
It comes after the company produced drop-in jet fuel meeting ASTM D7566 Annex A1 specifications during a near Madera, California.
The company previously said the pilot puts commercial SAF within reach at less than $100,000 per barrel-per-day of installed capacity at commercial scale.
At the pilot stage, Circularity Fuels claimed to have completed the world’s first end-to-end conversion of raw agricultural biogas into SAF, through a single integrated system.
The company’s technology stack pairs its electrified Ouro bi-reforming reactor with the compact Aion Fischer-Tropsch synthesis reactor.
Both are modular, low-cost, skid-mounted reactors, so the system is sized for the small, distributed scales.
Circularity plans to license the technology behind its Ouro reactor to partners.
US livestock operations represent an opportunity for domestic SAF production. According to the American Biogas Council, US farms are capturing 166% more biogas than five years ago.
Domestically, 631 farms produce over 61 million MMBtu of energy annually, compared to about 23 million MMBtu five years ago.
