Updated by "Forest Circular Economy" Editorial Board on July 19, 2025, 6:06 PM JST
Editorial Board, Forest Circular Economy
Forestcircularity-editor
We aim to realize "Vision 2050: Japan Shines, Forest Circular Economy" promoted by the Platinum Forest Industry Initiative. We will disseminate ideas and initiatives to promote biomass chemistry, realize woody and lumbery communities, and encourage innovation in the forestry industry in order to fully utilize forest resources to decarbonize the economy, strengthen economic security, and create local communities.
The Mitsubishi Chemical Group, through its corporate venture capital subsidiary Diamond Edge Ventures, Inc., announced that it has invested in Licella Holdings Ltd, an Australian company that possesses oil conversion technology for used plastics and biomass. The investment will expand the business of recycling waste materials that have been considered difficult to recycle and will help establish a new resource cycle.
The Cat-HTR(TM) process is a technology for oilification of used plastics and biomass in supercritical water under high temperature and high pressure conditions to produce raw materials for chemicals and SAF. Not only plastics, but also woody residues can be converted to oil. The Hydro-PRT(TM) technology of Mura Technology of the U.K., which was adopted in the chemical recycling facility that Mitsubishi Chemical and ENEOS jointly built in July, was also built based on Cat-HTR.
In March, the group announced its "Study for Commercialization of SAF and Other Products Production Business Using Domestic Forest Resources," which envisioned the use of Licella's technology to produce bionaphtha, SAF, biodiesel, and other products from biomass. In its management vision, the company has positioned "a stable supply base for green chemicals" as one of its key business areas, and is now studying ways to diversify its feedstock sources.
The collaboration between the group and Licella has the potential to increase the number of raw material options that do not depend on petroleum-derived materials and bring a new system of resource recycling to society. The establishment of a technology to generate useful resources from waste that has been difficult to reuse will open up new possibilities for Japan's forest resources, which have yet to be fully utilized.
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