Eni opens its second HVO biorefinery in Italy

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Type of post: NEWS.

Eni has opened its second HVO biorefinery in Italy. Launched in August 2019, its reconverted plant at Gela joins to the Venice biorefinery started in June 2014. The new facility has a processing capacity of up to 750,000 tons/year and will be able to treat increasing quantities of used vegetable oil, animal fat, algae and by-products to produce advanced biofuels. The new biorefinery will allow Eni to improve in all environmental fields, emitting more than 70% fewer emissions (SO2, NOx, CO2 and dust) than traditional production cycles.
Press release: “Eni opens its bio-refinery in Gela”, 19/9/2019.

Figure 1. Eni head office in Rome

Converting a conventional refinery into a biorefinery

All the petrochemical plants built in Gela since 1962 have closed down. The process of converting the traditional refinery into a biorefinery began in April 2016 and took more than 3 million hours of work by Eni’s employees and third parties to finish. To create the Ecofining™ plant, the two existing desulphurisation units were modified and a steam reforming unit was built to produce hydrogen.

In addition to the 294 M€ that has been spent so far on reconverting the refineries, Eni plans to invest another 73 M€ for further preliminary activities and pretreating biomass, which will be finished by the third quarter of 2020 and will supply the biorefinery with 2G raw material.

Besides its new biorefinery, the site is also home to the pilot waste-to-fuel plant (Syndial pilot plant), which has been transforming organic waste into bio-oil, biomethane and water since last December.

Feedstock flexibility

Eni's biorefinery in Gela is designed for treating advanced and unconventional loads up to 100% of processing capacity. Gela is defined by its ability to process 2G raw material from waste from food production, regenerated used cooking oil (RUCO), animal fat (tallow) and by-products from processing vegetable oil. This makes it an innovative plant based in the circular bioeconomy principles.

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