AIIB lends $58 million to Acelen for Brazil SAF biorefinery

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank on June 9 said it will lend $58 million to Acelen Renewables for a large-scale biorefinery in Bahia, Brazil, adding multilateral capital to one of Latin America’s biggest SAF buildouts. The HEFA plant is designed to process about 20,000 barrels a day of feedstocks into sustainable aviation fuel and renewable diesel.

The project sits beside the Mataripe Refinery in Bahia and is aimed at supplying both domestic and international markets with SAF and HVO. AIIB said the plant will use soybean oil, used cooking oil and other waste-based inputs, a feedstock mix that fits Brazil’s push to scale lower-carbon fuels without relying on a single crop stream.

Acelen said in May 2026 that it had secured $1.5 billion to begin construction of the renewable fuels biorefinery, with the financing package led by HSBC and the International Finance Corp. The new AIIB commitment adds another layer to that capital stack, which is being assembled around a project that the company launched at COP28 in 2023 under Acelen Renewables.

The wider venture is tied to macaúba, a native Brazilian oilseed that Acelen says will anchor a broader supply chain on 180,000 hectares of degraded land. Company materials say the full project targets annual output of 1 billion liters of renewable diesel and SAF and could involve more than R$12 billion in investment, underscoring the scale of the bet on Brazil as a long-term biofuels supplier.

The financing lands as Brazil hardens its policy framework. The country enacted the Fuels of the Future law on Oct. 8, 2024, creating a Sustainable Aviation Fuel National Program to promote research, production, commercialization and use of SAF. The International Air Transport Association called the measure an important step toward aviation decarbonization, and the new AIIB loan suggests that policy support is now being paired with development-bank money to de-risk first-wave projects.