Enilive Fires Up Gela Biorefinery, Europe's Newest Dedicated SAF Plant

Enilive, the mobility and biofuels division of Italy's Eni, started making sustainable aviation fuel at its Gela biorefinery in Sicily, the company said on January 22. The plant is built to turn out 400,000 tonnes of SAF a year, and Enilive claims that single site can supply close to a third of the SAF Europe is expected to consume in 2025. The timing is not an accident. Three weeks earlier, on January 1, the European Union's blending mandate took effect and every jet-fuel supplier on the continent became a forced buyer.

What makes Gela worth watching is that this is a dedicated unit, not a co-processing add-on. Eni rebuilt part of an existing biorefinery to produce jet fuel as a distinct product stream rather than blending a little bio-content into diesel and calling it progress. That is a harder engineering problem, and it says something about where Enilive thinks the margin is going.

What Eni actually built at Gela

The Gela refinery was converted from crude processing to biofeedstock years ago, part of Eni's push to keep aging Italian sites alive by feeding them fats and oils instead of barrels. To make aviation-grade fuel, the plant needed more than a relabeling exercise. Enilive modified the isomerisation unit, fitting it with a new reactor and a product separation section so the hydrotreated stream can be cut to jet specification. The company also upgraded the tank farm and logistics to move a new finished product, and it has a third degumming line under construction to clean incoming feedstock before it hits the process.

Feedstock is the whole game in this business, and Gela leans on waste. The biorefinery can process 736,000 tonnes of biomass a year, drawn mainly from used cooking oils, animal fats, and byproducts of vegetable oil refining. That matters for two reasons. Waste and residue feedstocks carry the lowest carbon-intensity scores under EU accounting, and they sidestep the food-versus-fuel fight that dogs crop-based biofuels. The catch is that they are finite and increasingly fought over. Every HEFA plant in Europe and Asia is chasing the same drums of used cooking oil, and a lot of it comes from China.

The mandate that created the customer

None of this happens without ReFuelEU Aviation. The regulation sets a floor: fuel suppliers must blend at least 2% SAF into jet fuel from the start of 2025. The ramp after that is steep on paper. The minimum rises to 6% in 2030, 20% in 2035, 34% in 2040, 42% in 2045, and 70% by 2050. Airlines and fuel suppliers no longer choose whether to buy SAF. They choose from whom.

That is why a 2% starting point is bigger news than it sounds. Two percent of European jet fuel demand is a real number, and until now the supply to meet it barely existed. A dedicated 400,000-tonne plant coming online in the same month the rule bites gives Enilive a genuine head start on volume, and volume is what lets you sign the multi-year offtake deals that pay back a refinery conversion.

The numbers behind the one-third claim

Enilive's line that Gela can meet nearly a third of 2025 European SAF demand is defensible, but only because the market is still tiny. At a 2% blend, total EU SAF demand this year sits in the low single-digit millions of tonnes, so one large plant genuinely moves the needle. That ratio will collapse as the mandate steps up and competitors bring their own capacity on. It is a first-mover statistic, not a durable market share.

The more telling figure is what Enilive plans next. The company wants SAF production optionality of 1 million tonnes a year by 2026, more than double what Gela alone delivers. It is targeting biorefining capacity above 5 million tonnes a year by 2030, with the stated potential to double SAF output again by the end of the decade. Work at the Venice biorefinery at Porto Marghera is part of that build-out, and Enilive has flagged new projects further afield in Malaysia and South Korea to get closer to Asian feedstock and demand.

Where the pressure lands

The demand side is now guaranteed by law. The supply side is where this gets interesting, and where it could get ugly. Dedicated HEFA capacity is expanding fast across Europe, and all of it competes for the same waste oils and fats. If feedstock prices run ahead of what airlines will pay, the economics of these plants get thin regardless of the mandate. Enilive's answer is to lock in feedstock logistics early, which is what the extra degumming line and the overseas projects are really about.

There is also a technology ceiling. HEFA, the hydrotreated route Gela uses, is the mature and cheap way to make SAF today, but it is capped by feedstock availability. The larger volumes the 2035 and 2040 targets demand will need alcohol-to-jet, power-to-liquid, and other pathways that are years from cost parity. Gela is a strong opening move in a game that gets much harder around the end of this decade.

Reading the play

Strip away the press-release gloss and Gela is a smart, timed bet. Eni took an idle refinery, converted it, and now has it producing the one product European regulation is about to make mandatory, at the exact moment the rule takes force. Stefano Ballista, who runs Enilive, has been blunt that the company sees itself as a leader in HVO and biofuels, and starting SAF at Gela backs that up with tonnes rather than slides.

The open questions are the ones every SAF producer faces. Can Enilive secure enough low-carbon feedstock as rivals scale, and will airline willingness to pay keep up with a mandate that climbs relentlessly to 2050? Gela does not answer those. But it puts Enilive in the strongest position of any European producer to find out, and for now it is one of the few plants on the continent actually shipping the fuel the law requires.