Mubadala’s Brazil energy arm is planting an area larger than Los Angeles to grow its own jet fuel feedstock
Mubadala Capital’s Brazilian energy arm is building a USD 3 bn farming operation to power its biofuel strategy. Acelen Renováveis is planting macauba — a thorny, oil-rich palm fruit native to Brazil’s semi-arid interior — across as much as 144k hectares, an area slightly larger than Los Angeles, to feed what the Abu Dhabi fund hopes will eventually be five biorefineries, Bloomberg reports.
REMEMBER- We first reported Acelen’s Bahia biorefinery, a USD 2.5 bn plant designed to run on soybean oil and used cooking oil — commodities Acelen buys, not grows — in 2023. By 2024, Mubadala had scaled its Brazil biofuels ambition to USD 13.5 bn across five modules. When the Bahia plant locked in USD 1.5 bn in financing from a 10-bank syndicate led by HSBC and the IFC, macauba appeared only as one feedstock among several, but it now seems the crop has become the center of gravity.
The scale of land, headcount, and R&D Acelen has committed looks less like a refiner securing supply and more like a fund building an agricultural business from scratch. More than 200 researchers are working on the project, including a genetics program to breed out the fruit’s five-inch thorns and shrink the trees for easier harvesting.
Why macauba? The entire investment case rests on yield math: Acelen says the palm produces seven to 10 times more oil per hectare than soybeans.
Yes, but: Vertical integration into farming is a different risk category than anything Gulf sovereign capital has typically taken on in the energy transition space — funds write checks into midstream and downstream assets — they don’t usually become growers. Plus: The precedent isn’t encouraging. Jatropha, another oilseed crop pitched a decade ago as a biofuels breakthrough, was planted across 250k+ hectares, mostly in China, before weak breeding programs and inconsistent yields sank most of the projects, according to BloombergNEF.
Acelen is also up against a harder problem than planting: proving that its acquired land in Brazil is genuinely degraded rather than contested or fragmented — a verification challenge flagged by BloombergNEF as the project’s real bottleneck ahead of the farming itself.
Why it matters
Sustainable aviation fuel is still a rounding error in global energy terms — it made up just 0.6% of all aviation fuel consumed globally last year, and without mandates, it’s generally too expensive to compete with conventional jet fuel.
But that’s changing on a fixed timeline: The EU requires airlines to start cutting emissions in 2027, with targets rising to 10% by 2037, and SAF is expected to carry most of that load. Brazil is a logical place to chase that demand — it already runs the world’s most mature biofuels industry off sugarcane and soy, has cheap land, and Acelen inherited a foothold there when Mubadala bought the country’s second-largest refinery, Mataripe, from state energy firm Petrobras.
The Bahia refinery alone is designed to produce 20k barrels of SAF a day once fully operational — which on its own would equal roughly half of all SAF produced globally in 2025. That’s the scale of the prospect Mubadala is chasing, and it explains the appetite for such an unconventional venture: tight global supply and a hard 2027 mandate mean whoever can scale feedstock fastest will capture a market that’s about to get a regulatory tailwind.