Aether Fuels, a startup focused on sustainable fuel production technologies, will build a facility off the coast of Singapore to produce sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) for commercial use.
The plant is being developed in partnership with Aster—the joint venture between Indonesia’s PT Chandra Asri, backed by tycoon Prajogo Pangetsu, and global commodities trader Glencore.
It will be on Pulau Bukom, where Aster took over the energy and chemicals park from Shell Energy earlier this year. This will allow the plant to use industrial waste gas and biomethane from the Aster refinery on the island as feedstock for the fuel.
According to Aether, its technology allows the company to produce SAF at a lower cost and larger scale than existing approaches, by using waste carbon that does not compete with food or animal feed value chains as feedstock.
Dubbed Project Beacon, the Aether plant will have a production capacity of some 50 barrels a day, or roughly 1,600 tonnes a year, of sustainable aviation fuel. A larger facility, to produce 1,000 barrels of SAF a day, is also in the pipeline, although Aether has yet to decide on the site.
Aether has signed memorandums of understanding with potential customers Singapore Airlines (SIA) and JetBlue. It intends to sell the SAF out of Changi International Airport in Singapore, which just last month passed a Bill to levy a green fuel fee on all departing flights out of the city-state, to help fund airlines’ use of SAF.
For reference, SIA reported consuming 5.4 million tonnes of fuel for its financial year ended March 31, 2025. That was about 13.7% more than the year before, as cargo and passenger capacity increased and certain airspace restrictions led to longer flights.
As a group, SIA has set a goal of replacing 5% of total jet fuel consumption with SAF by 2030. It has purchased SAF from Finnish company Neste, which currently operates the world’s largest SAF production facility in Singapore.
Construction on Project Beacon will start next year, and it is slated to be operational by the first half of 2028. No financial details of the facility, including expected capital expenditure, were released.
Additionally, Aster’s chief financial officer Andre Khor said the group was looking to spend $2 billion across its portfolio, including asset upgrades. In September, Aster said it was investing $125 million to upgrade the mooring and pipeline infrastructure near its Bukom refinery to facilitate crude deliveries from Very Large Crude Carriers.
Aether CEO Connor Madigan told DealStreetAsia there is also potential to produce sustainable marine fuels in Singapore, given the country’s position as the world’s largest bunkering port.
“Singapore has been quite interested in our pitch on marine fuel,” Madigan said.
“We believe that the future of marine fuel will involve multiple fuels [such as] ammonia and methanol. But the truth is the majority of ships, for decades [more] are going to still require conventional fuel. So we want to make sure that there’s a drop-in solution—a diesel product that can go into unmodified ships—that is available in Singapore and other ports, so that ship owners that don’t have dual-fuel ships can still meet their compliance obligations.”
Aether was spun out of Xora Innovation, a deeptech-focused early-stage venture capital firm that is also a wholly-owned subsidiary of Temasek, in 2022.
In 2024, it raised $34 million in Series A funding from a slate of global investors led by AP Ventures. The other investors include Chevron Technology Ventures, CDP Venture Capital, and Zeon Ventures. Seed round lead investor Xora Innovation and other existing investors TechEnergy Ventures, Doral Energy-Tech Ventures, Foothill Ventures, and JetBlue Ventures also participated.
