Circularity Fuels closes $7 million seed round to scale jet fuel made from dairy biogas
Redwood City, California-based Circularity Fuels, which earlier this year completed the world’s first end-to-end conversion of raw biogas from dairy manure into sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), announced Nov. 5 that it has closed a $7 million seed round led by Trucks Venture Capital and DCVC, with participation from Sum Ventures and Automotive Ventures.
The round funds an 18-month push from lab proof to commercial blueprint.
Circularity will build and run a demonstration plant that produces jet fuel from biogas every day, complete the engineering design for a 75-barrel-per-day commercial plant and line up the airline fuel contracts needed to break ground.
Circularity will also begin licensing the technology behind its Ouro reactor, the electrified core of its fuel-making process, to partners who want to build plants of their own.
U.S. jet-fuel prices have soared 75 percent this year following the outbreak of war in the Middle East, and airlines have cut flights and passed higher costs on to travelers.
While SAF could reduce that dependence, it still meets less than 1 percent of global demand.
In the United States, most of it is made from used cooking oil (UCO) that is limited in supply and, according to Circularity Fuels, largely imported.
Large U.S. livestock operations produce nearly 1 trillion pounds of manure a year, yet fewer than 6 percent capture the resulting biogas.
Circularity’s modular systems are designed to turn that biogas into liquid fuel on the farm, giving farmers a new source of revenue and airlines a supply of fuel made from abundant waste.
In June, Circularity announced the first end-to-end conversion of raw dairy biogas into jet fuel meeting ASTM D7566 Annex A1 specifications, validated over a six-month pilot at a dairy near Madera, California.
The company projects commercial capital costs of roughly one-fifth those of jet-fuel plants now under construction in Europe.
The USDA has advanced Circularity’s application to Phase 2 of its review for a loan guarantee under the Section 9003 Biorefinery, Renewable Chemical and Biobased Product Manufacturing Assistance Program, which provides federal loan guarantees for commercial biorefineries.
“Every dairy already has the feedstock,” said Stephen Beaton, the founder and CEO of Circularity Fuels. “What’s been missing is a way to turn it into jet fuel that makes economic sense for the farmer and the airline. This funding lets us run our process at demonstration scale and design our first commercial plant. And as fuel supply gets harder to count on, fuel made close to home from waste we already have is worth more than ever.”
Zachary Bogue, the managing partner at DCVC, added, “We backed Circularity because methane and CO2 are wasted today at nearly every dairy and landfill, and Stephen’s team turns both into jet fuel with simple, affordable reactors. That is the kind of hard engineering that changes the economics of an entire industry, and we’re proud to back them from incubation to their first commercial plant.”
Puneeth Meruva, a partner at Trucks Venture Capital, said, “Circularity is going after a big, painful problem in a market that has watched a string of experiments fail to land at scale. It’s the first practical attempt to solve SAF’s unit-economics problems, and we look forward to supporting the Circularity Fuels team as they tackle the decarbonization of aviation.”
Circularity has now raised about $17 million in total, which includes nearly $7 million in grants from sources such as ARPA-E and the National Science Foundation.
