Safion Produces Over One Metric Ton of Cocura Oil™ in 1,000-Fold Scale-Up Campaign
Scale up campaign demonstrates integrated fermentation and gravity-based oil recovery at manufacturing-relevant scale
LOUISVILLE, Colo., August 3, 2026 — Safion Renewables Inc. is announcing the successful completion of a 10,000-liter Cocura Oil™ scale-up campaign in partnership with InnoTech Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Yielding more than one metric ton of Cocura Oil™, this campaign represents a 1,000-fold expansion from Safion’s first 10-liter fermentations in 2024.
The July 14 demonstration showed Safion’s integrated process operating in real time, from fermentation and extracellular oil production through primary product recovery. The campaign followed a deliberate scale-up progression through 100-liter and 1,000-liter operations before advancing to 10,000 liters.
Unlike conventional intracellular oil platforms, Cocura Oil™ is actively secreted by the production microorganism into the extracellular medium. This allows the oil to naturally separate from the fermentation broth, enabling a primary recovery process driven chiefly by gravity. During the Alberta campaign, Safion demonstrated solvent-free oil recovery without the need for added separation chemicals or high-speed rotating separation equipment.
“The HEFA industry needs a new feedstock oil that can be made, recovered and scaled economically, in order to alleviate the feedstock bottleneck.” said Eric M. Karp, Ph.D., founder and chief executive officer of Safion Renewables. “This campaign showed that Cocura Oil™ can do all three. In approximately two years, we progressed from 10-liter fermentations to 10,000 liters, produced metric-ton quantities and retained the simple, gravity-based recovery with no moving parts, and zero added chemicals that is central to the economics of the platform.”
The scale-up builds on a development program encompassing hundreds of fermentations across benchtop, pilot, and production scales, with no contamination failures reported during the campaign. Safion’s technical data also report Cocura Oil™ titers exceeding 110 grams per liter and recovery yields above 90 percent.
Invited technical representatives from global energy companies and other industry experts observed the fermentation and downstream recovery process live on the plant floor. Their attendance provided prospective strategic partners with a direct view of the process at the largest scale Safion has operated to date.
Cocura Oil™ is designed as a hydrotreatable feedstock for the Hydroprocessed Esters and Fatty Acids (HEFA) pathway used to produce sustainable aviation fuel. The platform can also support the production of renewable lubricants, surfactants, fragrances, and other specialty products, creating multiple potential product pathways from the same fermentation and recovery infrastructure.
Producing metric-ton quantities gives Safion sufficient material to advance downstream conversion trials, partner evaluations, customer sampling and product-qualification testing. It also provides operating data to support the company’s next scale-up objective: deployment in existing, underutilized fermentation assets capable of operating at 100,000 liters and above.
“Producing this much material changes the nature of our commercial conversations,” Karp said. “We can now move beyond small samples and laboratory projections into meaningful partner testing, hydrotreating, qualification and manufacturing planning. We are grateful to the InnoTech Alberta fermentation and bio-industrial services teams for helping us execute this campaign and to the industry representatives who traveled to Edmonton to see the process operate firsthand.”
About Safion Renewables
Safion Renewables Inc. is a biotechnology company developing scalable platforms for renewable oils, solvents and specialty chemicals. The company’s Cocura Oil™ platform produces an extracellular oil designed for simple recovery and conversion into sustainable aviation fuel, renewable lubricants, surfactants and other products. Safion’s renewable-solvents platform is developing lower-carbon alternatives for pharmaceutical and industrial applications. Founded by former national-laboratory scientists, Safion is headquartered in Louisville, Colorado.
Contact
Eric M. Karp, Ph.D.Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Safion Renewables Inc.
ekarp@safionrenewables.com
+1 270-313-6063