JERA Brand Guidelines: TEPCO and Chubu’s 2015 Venture and Its Rounded Lower-Case Mark

Two power groups pool their fuel and plants.

JERA is a joint venture, not a founder’s company. It is owned 50-50 by TEPCO Fuel & Power, part of the Tokyo Electric Power group, and Chubu Electric Power of Nagoya, as its own corporate outline states. Its corporate history gives the steps: on 7 October 2014 the two groups agreed to enter negotiations on a comprehensive alliance; on 9 February 2015 they signed a joint-venture agreement covering the whole chain “from upstream fuel investment and fuel procurement through power”; and on 30 April 2015 JERA was established. Japanese Wikipedia says it began with about 50 staff, and that the name was proposed by the TEPCO side.

The name is an acronym with a word inside it. JERA joins the initials of Japan and Energy to the English word era; the company writes the idea as “Japan’s Energy for a new Era,” and Japanese Wikipedia gives the same reading. Its stated mission is “to provide cutting-edge solutions to the world’s energy issues.”

The two parents moved their businesses across in stages. JERA took over their fuel transportation and fuel trading businesses on 1 October 2015; on 1 July 2016 it took over their existing fuel and overseas power businesses, including upstream assets and supply contracts; and on 1 April 2019 it took over their fuel receiving, storage and gas transmission businesses together with their existing thermal power stations, the company says. English Wikipedia says the plants it took over gave JERA a total output of about 67 gigawatts including capacity under construction, which it describes as making JERA Japan’s largest power generation company. The electricity is sold wholesale to retailers such as TEPCO Energy Partner and Chubu Electric Power Miraiz rather than directly to consumers, Japanese Wikipedia says.

The company is based in Nihonbashi, in Tokyo’s Chuo ward, with branches in Tokyo’s Chiyoda ward and in Nagoya, according to its own outline.

From upstream fields to power stations.

LNG sits at the centre of JERA’s business. The company says it handles approximately 35–40 million tonnes of LNG a year and works across the chain, from upstream stakes and long-term supply contracts, through shipping, to power generation. It runs the fuel side through two companies: JERA Global Energy Solutions, which manages the long-term portfolio, and JERA Global Markets, which it calls its exclusive trading and optimisation business across LNG, power, coal and freight. Japanese Wikipedia adds that in April 2017 the coal and freight trading arm of France’s EDF was folded into JERA’s trading business.

Its list of investment projects includes Australian LNG at Ichthys, Wheatstone, Gorgon, Darwin, Barossa and Scarborough, and Freeport LNG in Texas. Japanese Wikipedia records that on 6 January 2017 a cargo of US LNG bought by JERA arrived at Chubu’s Joetsu power station, the first import of US LNG into Japan outside Alaska. MarineLink reported that the first cargo from the Barossa project reached JERA’s Futtsu LNG terminal on 12 June 2026 aboard the carrier Sohshu Maru, and described JERA’s equity entitlement as about 425,000 tonnes a year.

Buying at that scale brings it close to other large importers. The Korea Times reported on 15 March 2026 that JERA and Korea’s KOGAS, which it called “the world’s two largest LNG buyers,” had signed a memorandum in Tokyo on LNG supply and demand management, including cargo swaps between their terminals; the paper said the two had first signed a cooperation memorandum in 2023 and had completed a swap in June 2025.

Beyond fuel, JERA has moved into renewables and retail. Japanese Wikipedia says it announced its first overseas offshore wind investment in December 2018, and that the Formosa 1 offshore wind farm off Taiwan began commercial operation in January 2020; it also reports that in May 2024 JERA announced a move into electricity retail through a subsidiary, JERA Cross. The company’s stated vision is to scale up “its clean energy platform of renewables and low greenhouse gas thermal power.”

Design and documentation.

LNG and natural-gas companies sell something few customers ever see. Gas is cooled to a liquid, carried across oceans and warmed back into gas before it reaches a power station, a factory or a kitchen, so the companies in this guide tend to present themselves through the places and machines that do that work rather than through the product itself.

For exporters, the plant is the picture. Websites and press releases show liquefaction trains, storage tanks and loading docks, often lit at dusk or photographed from the air, and describe each site by its location, acreage and capacity in million tonnes a year. Shipping and floating-terminal companies lean on their vessels instead: membrane tankers, floating storage and regasification units and floating liquefaction ships, each with its own name. Utilities and gas distributors tend to come closer to home, with blue flames, kitchen hobs and heating, and with tariffs and service pages.

The other common thread is time. Projects are told as sequences of milestones: permits, sales agreements, a final investment decision, first cargo and the start of commercial operations, each with a date. Investor presentations add capacity charts, contract tables and maps of buyers in Europe and Asia, while safety, environment and community pages, along with grievance and regulatory notices, sit alongside them, often written for the neighbours of a plant as much as for its customers.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it, where its plants and ships operate, and what has happened to them, including outages, disputes and changes of ownership, stated with dates. It marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word, and the colours and typefaces shown are our own unofficial interpretation, not any company’s brand standard.

Soft, rounded lower-case letters.

JERA explains its logo on its corporate history page under the heading “What’s in a logo?” The company says the idea of contributing to “a clean and harmonious society through a new energy business model” is expressed in “the soft and rounded lower-case lettering of the logo,” which it says evokes “a personal and close involvement with the daily life of consumers.” It adds a geometric detail: the letters J and R, E and A “occupy the same rectangular shape, standing out in reverse from the background,” which the company says evokes “the circulation of borderless energy in society.” Under the same page it sets the name out as “Japan’s Energy for a new Era,” with the initials picked out.

The identity is used beyond the corporate site. Japanese Wikipedia records that in November 2019 JERA signed on as title partner of Japanese professional baseball’s Central League for three seasons from 2020; it also lists a uniform sponsorship of a women’s basketball team from 2021. The company now presents its values under the line “Ownership to Serve Our Tomorrows.”

The brand’s record is compact: a name agreed between the two parents in 2014–15, a company assembled through three transfers between 2015 and 2019, and a logo whose meaning the company sets out itself.

For a design guide, JERA shows how a joint venture can build a new name out of initials and a single English word, and give its lettering a stated meaning. Compare KOGAS, Korea’s state gas buyer and its partner on cargo swaps, and Freeport LNG, one of the export projects it invests in. For this guide we use a kiln red, a soft blush and an ash grey with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep JERA’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.