Topsoe and BioVeritas announced in May 2026 an agreement that would allow fuel producers to license BioVeritas’ process for producing second-generation intermediates alongside Topsoe’s HydroFlex technology. The agreement is significant because it tries to connect two parts of the renewable-fuels market that have not yet scaled together: lignocellulosic residues, such as woody biomass and agricultural by-products, and refinery infrastructure originally built around hydrotreating lipid feedstocks.
HEFA and renewable diesel have benefited from a practical advantage: oils and fats are pumpable, tradable and compatible with established logistics. Lignocellulosic biomass has the opposite profile. It is bulky, heterogeneous and regional. BioVeritas’ proposition is to convert that material into intermediates marketed as KEYTones, which Topsoe says can enter HydroFlex to produce renewable fuels. If the route performs commercially, it could widen the feedstock base beyond used cooking oil, tallow, vegetable oils and other constrained lipid streams.
The agreement addresses a feedstock bottleneck that technology alone cannot solve
The strategic logic is easy to understand. IATA’s feedstock work and recent European policy discussions both point to a widening mismatch between sustainable aviation fuel demand and the availability of low-carbon lipids. Airlines, fuel suppliers and regulators cannot rely indefinitely on a limited pool of waste oils and animal fats. Dedicated oil crops may help in some regions, but they introduce their own land, certification and establishment risks. Residues from forestry, agriculture and processing therefore remain one of the few large categories of underused renewable carbon.
The difficulty is that residue potential does not behave like refinery feedstock. Corn stover, wheat straw, sawmill residues and forest thinnings vary by season, location, moisture, ash, contaminants and competing local uses. A bankable intermediate route needs more than a conversion concept. It needs delivered-cost curves, specification controls, storage strategy, pre-processing, yield stability and reliable offtake for every product and by-product.
HydroFlex can reduce market-entry risk, but not upstream execution risk
Topsoe’s role matters because fuel producers already understand hydrotreating, catalyst systems, hydrogen balances and product certification better than they understand new rural biomass platforms. If KEYTones can be produced at consistent quality, a HydroFlex connection may reduce the number of unfamiliar steps inside the refinery gate. That is commercially valuable: investors prefer technology combinations that reuse existing engineering knowledge, product pathways and operational disciplines.
The upstream side remains the harder diligence item. A lignocellulosic intermediate facility must manage biomass procurement, biological or catalytic conversion, product recovery and purification before the refinery ever sees a suitable feed. Even small changes in residue quality can affect pretreatment, fermentation or downstream separation. The commercial question is not whether residues are abundant in a national inventory; it is whether a plant can secure enough suitable tonnes within a profitable transport radius and turn them into an intermediate that refiners will accept without discounting the fuel.
| Test | Evidence needed |
|---|---|
| Feedstock mobilisation | Contracts, transport distances, storage losses and specification controls. |
| Intermediate quality | Consistent KEYTone composition, impurity management and refinery acceptance. |
| Conversion economics | Observed yield, uptime, utilities and co-product value at demonstration or commercial scale. |
| Carbon value | Traceable residue origin, lifecycle boundary and certification pathway. |
The route will be judged by repeatability, not by eligibility
The agreement fits a broader industry search for pathways that can use existing fuel infrastructure without depending on the same lipid pool. That is why it deserves attention from project developers and investors. It could make agricultural and woody residues relevant to assets that would otherwise remain constrained by oils and fats. Yet eligibility for renewable fuel markets does not create a project-finance case by itself.
The next credible milestones are practical: a reference project, independently understood yields, confirmed refinery specifications, a residue procurement model, a lifecycle-carbon pathway and offtake structures that recognise both technology and feedstock risk. Until those are visible, the Topsoe-BioVeritas agreement should be read as a serious industrial option rather than as proof that lignocellulosic residues have already entered the HEFA mainstream.
Sources and further reading
- Topsoe, “Topsoe and BioVeritas sign agreement to accelerate second-generation renewable fuels production,” May 2026
- IATA, “Global Feedstock Assessment for SAF Production: Outlook to 2050,” September 2025
