Investancia to plant 50 million trees in HVO/SAF deal with ECB Group

Agroforestry and research company Investancia has signed a 30-year offtake deal with ECB Group for 300,000 tonnes of ‘reforestation oil’ from the pongamia tree.
The Investancia tree propagation and R&D centre, located near Carmelo Peralta, Alto Paraguay, is the world’s largest dedicated elite pongamia tree production site.
Its current annual production capacity of 1 million trees will scale over the next 10 years to a total of 50 million trees, planted across 125,000 hectares.
Pongamia oil has one of the lowest carbon intensity levels of all available feedstocks and is three times less carbon intensive than soybean oil.
“We are extremely proud to team-up with the strategic investment of ECB to establish the first major HVO refinery in the southern hemisphere,” said Marcel van Heesewijk, CEO and founder of Investancia.
“During the last year we were able to jointly develop plans to put South America, and more specifically Paraguay on the map as the leading region for next generation green fuels using feedstock generated from our certified reforestation activities in the Paraguayan Chaco. Our combined efforts have immediate and multiple impacts on climate change.”
The pongamia oil will be refined by the ECB Group at their new 800,000 MT state-of-the-art Omega Green HVO/SAF refinery, located in Villeta, Paraguay near Asuncion.
The ECB Group Paraguay and Shell have signed a multi-year contract that will provide more than 500 million litres of renewable diesel and renewable jet fuel per year to Shell. The contract is expected to run from 2024-2029, totalling 2.5 billion litres of HVO/SPK.
The ECB Group also announced the execution of a contract with bp to sell in excess of a billion litres of biodistillate between 2024-2029.
Investancia started developing its feedstock from reforestation in 2014, with early genetics development support from US-based partner TERVIVA. Investancia’s pongamia oil, refined for hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO), is low carbon, low indirect land use change (ILUC) and complies with Europe’s Renewable Energy Directive and California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standards.
“With this pongamia oil supply agreement, we seek to diversify the portfolio of raw materials for the operation of our Omega Green biorefinery with lower carbon intensity solutions between the production harvests of vegetable oil," added Erasmo Battistella, CEO of ECB Group.