The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) disclosed on June 9 a $58 million loan to Acelen Renewables to help finance a $1.5 billion HEFA biorefinery in Bahia, Brazil. The facility is sized at approximately 20,000 barrels per day and is being built to produce sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and renewable diesel (HVO) from soybean oil, used cooking oil and other waste-based feedstocks.
The disclosure matters because it is the first public DFI participation in what AIIB describes as a roughly $1.5 billion multilateral financing package, anchored by Mubadala Capital as project sponsor through its ownership of Acelen Renewables. AIIB’s $58 million represents about 3.9% of the headline project cost on its own, but the institution explicitly expects the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Inter-American Development Bank and other development finance institutions to participate alongside it. That signal is what offtakers and other lenders watch: AIIB participation, with the IFC and IDB queued behind it, is the institutional validation a Brazilian SAF project of this scale needs to clear financial close.
The plant economics turn on HEFA pathway scale. At 20,000 barrels per day of total renewable fuel capacity, the Bahia plant is one of the larger single-site HEFA biorefineries advancing toward construction in Latin America. The feedstock mix matters for the credit math: under US 45Z, the lifecycle carbon-intensity score (calculated via the 45ZCF-GREET model) determines the per-gallon credit, with soybean-oil HEFA scoring a higher CI and therefore a smaller credit than UCO or waste-based HEFA. ICAO CORSIA applies its own default LCA values per feedstock-pathway combination, producing a lower emissions-reduction value for soy than for waste feedstocks. The blended slate cushions the project’s average credit and CORSIA value rather than locking it into the soy-only score. AIIB and Acelen did not disclose target offtakers or the SAF/HVO product split.
The structuring of this financing confirms the project’s technical, financial, environmental and social robustness. We are now entering a new phase of large-scale industrial execution.
AIIB CIO Konstantin Limitovskiy positioned the loan in transition terms: “By supporting the production of cost-competitive, lower-emission fuels, the project should help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in hard-to-abate sectors such as aviation. We are helping accelerate Brazil’s transition toward lower-carbon energy systems while supporting employment and local economic development, while also strengthening technical capabilities in advanced biofuel production.” Acelen Renewables CEO Luiz de Mendonça framed the funding round as the gating event for construction: “The structuring of this financing confirms the project’s technical, financial, environmental and social robustness. We are now entering a new phase of large-scale industrial execution.”
The Mubadala Capital sponsorship is the structural read. Mubadala Capital, the Abu Dhabi-based asset manager, acquired the Mataripe refinery in Bahia from Petrobras in 2021 and built Acelen as its Brazilian downstream platform. The renewables arm, Acelen Renováveis, is the vehicle for the Bahia SAF and HVO project. A Gulf sovereign-linked sponsor backstopping the equity and the AIIB-IFC-IDB lender stack on the debt side is the type of capital structure Brazilian SAF needs to clear FID. The other Brazilian SAF project of comparable scale is Petrobras’ REPLAN ethanol-to-jet plant, on a different technology pathway.
The forward read is whether the IFC and IDB tickets confirm before year-end, and whether Acelen pre-sells offtake to support drawdown. Brazil’s ProBioQAV regime, set under Law 14,993 (2024), requires domestic airlines to cut lifecycle GHG emissions from domestic operations by 1% in 2027, escalating one percentage point a year to 10% by 2037. That is an emissions-intensity obligation rather than a volumetric blend mandate, but it still creates a captive domestic demand signal for Bahia HEFA tonnes. The export question is more nuanced. Under ReFuelEU Aviation, feedstock eligibility defers to RED III: soybean oil is a food/feed crop and excluded from Annex IX-A advanced-biofuel status, so only the UCO and waste-fraction portion of Bahia output is straightforwardly ReFuelEU-eligible (with Annex IX-B caps applying). The UK SAF Mandate runs a different feedstock framework under the RTFO, and accepts a broader HEFA slate up to its 71% sub-cap by 2030. The two European regimes therefore produce different routes for the same barrel. The Uzbekistan $6.08 billion biorefinery is the comparable multilateral-financed reference point, though at a larger scale and across both HEFA and e-SAF pathways.
Source: AIIB press release
