Eni signs 500-million-euro finance agreement with EIB to convert petroleum complex in Livorno, Italy, into biorefinery
- Eni S.p.A.
- Jul 24
- 3 min read
Eni announced July 24 that it has signed a 15-year, 500-million-euro (USD$588 million) finance contract with the European Investment Bank to support the conversion of Eni’s Livorno refinery in Tuscany, Italy, into a biorefinery.
The agreement was signed July 24 at Eni’s headquarters in San Donato Milanese by Gelsomina Vigliotti, a vice president with EIB, and Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi.
ElB is the long-term lending institution of the European Union owned by its member states.
It finances investments that contribute to EU policy objectives.
Eni’s project involves the construction of new plants to produce hydrotreated biofuels at the Livorno refinery site including a biogenic pretreatment unit and an Ecofining™ plant scaled at 500,000 metric tons per year.
Thanks to its proprietary Ecofining™ technology, Eni’s company dedicated to sustainable mobility, Enilive, produces hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO), also known as renewable diesel, made from renewable feedstocks such as used cooking oil and agrifood waste.
Pure HVO can now be used in approved engines and is distributed through existing infrastructure.
“The EIB financing is key to delivering a project of high environmental, technological and strategic value, helping to promote the decarbonization of the transport sector,” Vigliotti said. “This is a concrete example of how industrial innovation can accelerate the path towards climate neutrality while generating sustainable value for regions.”
The project is part of Enilive’s strategy to reach more than 5 million tons of biorefinery capacity by 2030.
“The agreement with the EIB confirms Eni’s concrete and high-quality commitment in the transition towards increasingly decarbonized energy,” Descalzi said. “It also underscores the validity of our approach, which is to invest and leverage all available and effective initiatives and technologies for reducing emissions. This virtuous approach is now leading us to convert a third refinery into a biorefinery in Italy, following the examples of Venice and Gela.”
HVO biofuels play a key role because they can make an immediate contribution to reducing transport-sector emissions generated not only on roads but also by air traffic, maritime and rail transport (calculated along the entire value chain).
The conversion of the Livorno site is in line with Enilive’s strategy to increase the production of biofuels in response to growing demand in Europe and Italy to meet both emission-reduction targets under the Renewable Energy Directive (RED III) and the obligations to release pure biofuels for use as defined by Italian legislation.
Worldwide, it is estimated that the demand for hydrotreated biofuels will increase by 65 percent from 2024 to 2028.
The Livorno biorefinery will be able to treat different types of biogenic feedstocks—mainly waste and residues of plant origin—to produce HVO, biobased naphtha and bio-LPG.
In addition to the adoption of advanced technologies, a distinctive feature of the project is the possibility of modifying the layout of the plant in the future to have the flexibility to also produce sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), which is a key element of efforts to decarbonize aviation.
This gives flexibility to the investment and brings it up to speed with the environmental priorities of the European Union, broadening the potential impact.
This operation is part of the energy transition at the national and European level, Eni noted, contributing substantially to decarbonization of the transport sector and the reduction of CO2 emissions.
It also supports the achievement of Italy’s targets for the production of pure biofuels, which under current legislation provides for a gradual increase in use from 300,000 tons per year in 2023 to 1 million tons by 2030.
