Investor appetite for a huge green jet fuel refinery on the South Humber Bank has been welcomed after developer Velocys raised £20 million in a new share offer.
Strong demand saw the initial allocation doubled, with a further issue now on the horizon.
A total of 400 million new ordinary shares were issued to retail and institutional investors by the company behind the £350 million Stallingborough plant.
More than 376 million were conditionally placed with investors, at 5p per share, with chief executive Henrik Wareborn stating the package was oversubscribed.
The company received planning consent for the huge waste-to-fuels facility from North East Lincolnshire Council last month.
Since then it has been buoyed by government steps to embrace the decarbonisation of aviation, with Transport Secretary Grant Shapps name-checking the development at a Downing Street briefing.
He went on to launch a Jet Zero Council - with Velocys likely to play its part as it works up the final stages of the plant, which could be further scaled up to an investment in the region of £500 million.
Of the placing, Mr Wareborn said: “We are delighted with the support shown by both new and existing investors in this fundraising - we are particularly pleased to see a number of high-quality institutional investors join our shareholder register.
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“The offering was upsized from £10 million to £20 million to help meet the additional demand but we are pleased to say that even at this higher level the issue was still significantly oversubscribed.
“We look forward to seeing our retail investors participate in the forthcoming open offer to the extent that they have not been able to already subscribe via the retail offer.
“This capital raise accelerates our ability to provide commercial scale turn-key solutions to fuel producers in the energy transition away from fossil fuels into sustainable fuels towards improved air quality and net zero carbon emissions.”
Altalto Immingham, the joint venture with British Airways and Shell, is being brought forward, alongside a similar development in the US. It will be Europe's first commercial scale project, taking hundreds of thousands of tonnes of black bin bag waste and converting it to aviation-grade fuel.
Velocys, formed as a result of an Oxford University spin-out and merger with an American company developing complementary proprietary technology, now has a market capitalisation of £49.7 million.
Lansdowne Partners, an existing shareholder, acquired 60 million shares, taking it close to two million, representing 18.4 per cent of the total capital. The directors added a further 1.2 million to their holdings.
Numis Securities, Canaccord Genuity and Turner Pope Investments acted for investors, with Radnor Capital Partners and Peat & Co the selling agents.
The company now proposes to raise a further £1 million with an open offer for 20 million new shares to existing shareholders.