EU Cash For
Fuel From Waste

XFuel a producer of “high-grade sustainable drop-in fuels and carbon removal for the transport sector”, says it has secured €7.7 million in blended finance from the European Innovation Council (EIC), helping it bring its fuel-from-waste technology to transport markets.

EIC Accelerator is a funding programme under Horizon Europe, the EU’s framework for research and innovation. It offers support to start-ups and SMEs that have an innovative, game changing product, service or business model that could create new markets or disrupt existing ones 
in Europe and even worldwide.
The accelerator offers grants of up to €2.5 million combined with equity investments through the EIC Fund ranging from €0.5 to €15 million (up to €10 million as of 2025).
In 2025, the EIC is expected to allocate more than €1.4b of funds

Mallorca, Spain-based company XFuel says it has developed proprietary conversion and refining technologies that can produce cost-competitive low-carbon drop-in fuels for the transport sector. These are produced from a variety of scalable waste materials, with a focus on industrial hydrocarbons and biomass residues.

It adds that the drop-in nature of its fuels mean that it meets fossil fuel specifications and performance, “making them fully compatible with existing combustion engines and fossil fuel infrastructure and allowing for direct replacement today”. XFuel says its products require no capital expenditure and significantly reduce operational costs by owners when compared to other decarbonisation options in the industry.

XFuel says it has developed two novel technologies that produce high-grade transport fuel; chemical liquid refining (CLR), which can refine and crack hydrocarbon liquids and residues into ultra-clean drop-in transport fuels for marine, road and aviation sectors, and mechanical carbon conversion (MECC), which co-processes lignocellulosic waste biomass and waste oils to produce low carbon transport fuels and biochar.