Italy: EIB and Eni sign EUR 500 million finance agreement to convert Livorno refinery into a biorefinery

Mechanism

EIB, the EU's public multilateral lending arm, extended a EUR 500 million 15-year finance contract directly to Eni (signed by EIB Vice-President Gelsomina Vigliotti and Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi) to fund conversion of Eni's existing Livorno petroleum refinery in Tuscany into a biorefinery. The capital funds new plant construction — a biogenic feedstock pre-treatment unit and a 500,000 tonne/year Ecofining(TM) unit — that will process waste and plant-residue biogenic charges into HVO diesel, HVO naphtha and bio-LPG, with a stated option to reconfigure output toward SAF later. This is single-company debt financing from a multilateral development bank rather than a formal EU State-aid-notified grant scheme, consistent with EIB's typical market-economy-lender structuring for large industrial borrowers; GTA nonetheless flags it "Red" given the state-linked EIB's role in steering capital toward a specific national champion's asset conversion.

Downstream implications

• Extends the EIB/Eni green-financing relationship already seen in Italy's solar and mid-cap

guarantee facilities (2025-08-05-italy-eib-albasolar-solar-pv-green-loan, 2025-12-22-italy-eib-intesa-sanpaolo-midcap-guarantee) into refinery-to-biorefinery conversion — part of the broader EU pattern of using development-bank debt rather than direct subsidy to redirect refining capex toward biofuels/SAF feedstocks.

• Reinforces Eni's biorefinery buildout (Venice, Gela, now Livorno) as the company's primary lever for

EU renewable-fuel mandate compliance (RED III / ReFuelEU Aviation SAF blending targets).

Open questions

• No public disclosure of expected completion date or commissioning timeline for the Livorno

conversion was found in the primary source.

• Whether EU State-aid clearance was separately required for this financing was not identified from

the EIB press release and is not asserted here.