Sustainable aviation fuel
Hydrotreatable lipid feedstock designed to enter existing HEFA and refinery infrastructure.
Cocura Oil™ platform
The simplest route from sugar to refinery-ready oil.
Cocura Oil™ is an extracellular oil platform built to bypass the recovery, sterility, and scale-up bottlenecks that have held back fermentation-derived oils.
Extracellular platform oil · demonstrated through 10,000 L
HundredsFermentations completed
Bench → 10,000 LScale demonstrated
0Contamination failures
Gravity onlySeparation
The industry problem
The refinery is mature. The biological bridge to it is not.
Hydrotreating is already a proven route to aviation fuel, but the supply of affordable, sustainable lipid feedstocks is constrained. Expensive processing steps keep many fermentation pathways from competing with existing lipid sources.
The industry does not need another molecule that can be made. It needs an oil that can be made, recovered and scaled economically.
The Cocura Oil™ answer
Radical simplicity: make the oil outside the cell.
Cocura Oil™ is secreted directly into the broth by Safion’s proprietary engineered host, placing the product where it can be recovered simply and economically: outside the cell and in a separate dense oil phase.
Phase separation
No cell lysis
No primary recovery solvents
No moving parts in oil separation
No added recovery chemicals
01
Extracellular by design
The product does not need to be liberated from biomass. That removes the most punishing unit operations from conventional microbial-oil recovery.
02
Self-preserving chemistry
The organism acidifies its own broth, suppressing common contaminants and reducing sterility burden.
03
Native pathway stability
Safion improves an endogenous pathway rather than asking the host to carry a heavily foreign metabolic program.
04
Platform chemistry
The same short-chain, hydroxylated lipid supports fuel, lubricant, flavor, surfactant and antimicrobial value chains.
Evidence, not aspiration
Demonstrated from bench scale to 10,000 L.
Safion has repeatedly scaled the fermentation and primary recovery process, producing metric-ton quantities and validating the same simple separation logic at manufacturing-relevant scale.
Hundreds of runsFermentations completed across benchtop, pilot and 10,000 L scales.
Zero failuresNo contamination failures across the development campaign.
RepeatabilitySuccessful stepwise scale-up through 100 L, 1,000 L and 10,000 L production.
Primary DSPGravity-based oil recovery demonstrated without solvents, added chemicals or rotating separation equipment.
100+ hoursOn-stream testing completed across eight commercial hydrotreating catalysts.
>1 gallonMore than one gallon of aviation fuel produced from Cocura Oil™ during completed upgrading campaigns.
One oil. Multiple markets.
Commodity volume. Specialty value.
A broad SAF outlet can absorb the majority of production, while smaller-volume, higher-value products strengthen plant economics and reduce reliance on a single market.
High-performance lubricants
Hydroxylated short-chain lipids and derivatives for friction modification and specialty lubrication.
Massoia lactone
A low-CI natural flavor and fragrance ingredient positioned as an alternative to bark-derived massoia supply chains.
Surfactants
Amphiphilic lipid chemistry for wetting, cleaning, emulsification and specialty formulations.
Antimicrobial agents
Intact Cocura Oil chemistry with demonstrated bactericidal potential for selected applications.
The platform is designed so that SAF scale does not depend on SAF margin alone.
Product allocation can follow market demand: preserve a large-volume outlet for hydrotreating while selectively capturing higher-value specialty markets.
Additional products in development include low CI urethanes, 3D printable polymers, composites, and coatings.
Product slate
SurfactantAviation fuelRaw Cocura OilLubricant
Flavor & fragrance route
Massoia lactone can be isolated as a low-CI natural alternative to conventional bark-derived massoia ingredients, extending the platform into flavor and fragrance markets.
Capital-light commercialization
Deploy the biology. Reuse the steel.
Safion's commercial model is built around leasing existing idled fermentation capacity, adding a compact Cocura Oil recovery train, and using mature regional hydrotreating infrastructure instead of financing a greenfield complex.
From idle capacity to multiple revenue streams.
The operating model is designed to push capital toward market proof and site profitability rather than toward new concrete, utilities and stainless steel that already exist.
Illustrative deployment footprint
Brownfield opportunities are already distributed across the map.
Representative geographies from Safion development materials illustrate the broader thesis: existing fermentation assets can be reactivated, upgraded with Cocura Oil technology and connected to real market pathways without building a new greenfield complex.
Reuse
Idled fermentation assets
Existing vessels, utilities, controls, labor pools and site infrastructure are reactivated rather than rebuilt.
Retrofit
Cocura Oil technology
Proprietary strain, fermentation recipe, controls and compact gravity recovery.
Connect
Existing refining network
Regional HEFA, hydrotreating, tolling and product distribution infrastructure.
Full-scale partner opportunity
The technology is ready for its next operating platform.
Safion is engaging facility owners, refiners, strategic offtakers and investors to move Cocura Oil™ into its next operating platform.
Selected industry context and technical references
- U.S. Department of Energy, SAF Grand Challenge Roadmap Implementation Framework: affordable sustainable lipid supply is a near-term HEFA constraint.
- Dong et al., Recovery of Fuel-Precursor Lipids from Oleaginous Yeast: cell lysis and lipid recovery process requirements.
- Meadows et al., Rewriting yeast central carbon metabolism for industrial isoprenoid production: engineering and oxygen-management demands for industrial farnesene production.
- Royce et al., The damaging effects of short-chain fatty acids on E. coli membranes: product toxicity of medium-chain acids.
- Uddin et al., Sustainable aviation fuel from ethanol: techno-economic analysis and life cycle analysis: ETJ cost and carbon sensitivity to upstream ethanol and process energy.