NorSAF and Nova Pangaea Close the Feedstock Loop for Liepāja's SAF Plant
NorSAF and UK cleantech Nova Pangaea Technologies have signed an MoU to build an advanced bioethanol plant in Latvia fed by forestry residues, supplying the 100,000 t/yr SAF and eSAF facility planned at Liepāja SEZ. We look at how the feedstock piece completes a Baltic Power-to-X chain, why Europe's import-heavy SAF supply makes it matter, and the Latvian research story behind the technology.
NEWS
PtXBaltic
10/15/20266 min read
The Liepāja SAF project has had an obvious gap for about two years now. NorSAF had the site, the terminal, a licensed alcohol-to-jet process and a hydrogen partner across the road. What it never had was a good answer to the question every lender asks first about an alcohol-to-jet plant: where is the ethanol coming from? On 2 October, in Brussels at the Permanent Representation of Latvia to the EU, NorSAF and the UK company Nova Pangaea Technologies signed an MoU that finally starts answering it. A bioethanol plant in Latvia, running on forestry and farm residues, feeding the 100,000 t/yr SAF and eSAF facility planned for the Liepāja Special Economic Zone.
An MoU is not a final investment decision, and nothing is built. We know. But this is the bit that turns a fuel plant into an actual supply chain, and Baltic hydrogen ecosystem stakeholders should read a little further than the headline.
The missing input, now on paper
The deal itself is simple enough. Nova Pangaea has REFNOVA, a patented process that turns woody and agricultural waste into ethanol and biochar. NorSAF needs ethanol, a lot of it, because the alcohol-to-jet (ATJ) route uses bioethanol as the main input for the bio-SAF stream and then, with green hydrogen and biogenic CO₂, for the eSAF stream as well. So the two want to build a bioethanol plant in Latvia and stop importing the stuff.
The biochar is the part we keep coming back to. It comes out of the process as a solid, the carbon stays locked in it, and Nova Pangaea says that makes the whole ethanol pathway carbon-negative. That is their number, nobody has audited it for this project, and we would want to see it at scale. But if it holds, Liepāja SAF ends up with a lower lifecycle footprint than most of the HEFA fuel being sold today. No site has been named for the ethanol plant yet. Both sides are hinting it will be near the biomass and not far from Liepāja, which is roughly what you would expect.
One port, the full Power-to-X stack
Look at what has quietly accumulated inside one special economic zone. NorSAF has run a liquid petroleum and chemicals terminal in Liepāja since 2017 and has been working on the SAF project since 2024. In May it signed a permanent licence with KBR for PureSAF, the Swedish Biofuels process that converts ethanol into a fully drop-in jet fuel and can co-process CO₂ and syngas in the same plant. In March it signed with CIS Liepāja, the hydrogen developer planning around 21,200 t/yr of electrolytic hydrogen in the same zone, for the eSAF hydrogen. And now the ethanol.
Line it up and it reads like a Power-to-X diagram someone drew on a whiteboard: renewable power into electrolysers, hydrogen plus captured biogenic CO₂ plus local bioethanol into the ATJ unit, SAF and eSAF out the other end. NorSAF's own figures are about 100,000 t/yr of SAF and eSAF, roughly 40,000 t of that eSAF, plus around 20,000 t of renewable petrol and diesel on the side, and an 83 percent greenhouse gas cut against fossil jet. The SAF plant is pegged at around €750 million, with another €250 million or so going into hydrogen infrastructure. First fuel is provisionally 2031. KBR's release said 2030. Treat it as a window.
That is why a non-binding piece of paper matters here. The ATJ route is only as European as the ethanol going into it. Without a local feedstock plant, Liepāja would have been a European conversion step sitting on top of an imported input. With one, the whole chain can be sourced in the region.
Europe's feedstock problem is the real market driver
A Latvian ethanol plant got a signing ceremony in Brussels for a reason. Europe's SAF supply has an import problem that most of the public debate skips over. Nearly all SAF made today is HEFA, which runs on used cooking oil and animal fats. NorSAF, quoting IATA data from 2025, says around 85 percent of that feedstock is imported and China alone supplies about 61 percent. We have not gone back to the IATA report to check those two numbers, so take them as NorSAF's framing. The direction is not in doubt though. Europe has far more HEFA capacity than European feedstock to run through it.
Then there is ReFuelEU Aviation. Fuel suppliers at EU airports had to blend 2 percent SAF in 2025. That goes to 6 percent in 2030, including 1.2 percent eSAF made with renewable hydrogen, and 25 percent in 2035 with at least 5 percent eSAF. The eSAF piece cannot be met with cooking oil at all. It needs hydrogen and CO₂, and Liepāja is one of a very short list of European projects designed for both streams from the start.
Laurent Donceel, who runs the European renewable ethanol association ePURE, put the wider point well in his own post about the signing: renewable ethanol should not be thought of as a road fuel only, it is becoming a building block for the next generation of renewable fuels, aviation included. For a region as dependent on air links as the Baltics, that is more than a slogan. If Europe wants to decarbonise flying with fuel it actually makes, then Latvian forestry residues stop being a by-product and start being a strategic resource.
From a Riga laboratory to Teesside and back
Here is the part that should land with anyone who has watched Baltic research walk out the door. REFNOVA started at the Latvian State Institute of Wood Chemistry in Riga. The technology then spent about a decade being developed in the UK, where Nova Pangaea now runs a demonstration plant on Teesside. Jonathan Wood, the company's chief commercial officer, told LSM in Brussels that the technology is Latvian, that the company owns the IP and develops it in Britain, and that he could not wait to bring it back here.
And Nova Pangaea has a track record. It works with British Airways and LanzaJet on Project Speedbird, a UK government-backed effort to make SAF from non-food agricultural and woody biomass. So the Latvian plant would be its second ATJ-linked deployment, not a first attempt. For Latvia it is a rare thing: home-grown wood-chemistry research coming back as an industrial asset, using the country's biggest renewable resource for something worth more than pellets or pulp.
Costs, claims and what is still unsettled
Some caveats, and they belong in the body of the piece. On price, NorSAF board member Jānis Kisiels told LSM that bio-based SAF currently costs around three to four times fossil jet fuel, and hydrogen-based synthetic fuel roughly ten times, with costs expected to come down as the industry scales. That ratio is the whole reason the eSAF sub-mandate exists. Nobody is buying eSAF because it is cheaper.
On money, the numbers floating around do not quite match. LETA has a €750 million SAF plant plus roughly €250 million in hydrogen infrastructure. In the LSM interview Kisiels talked about €250–500 million of total investment and said the project could add about 2.5 percent to Latvia's GDP and 11 percent to light manufacturing output. These are the company's own projections, the scope behind each figure is different, and the GDP claim in particular deserves a look at the assumptions before anyone repeats it. On ownership: NorSAF 51 percent owned by Avia Solutions Group and 49 percent by Estonian-registered Tlljet, beneficially owned by Latvian businessman Raimonds Kisiels, with 2025 turnover of about €1.28 million from the existing terminal.
On timing, the environmental impact assessment is running, the company is openly looking for more equity investors, and the ethanol plant still has to go through its own siting, permitting and financing before it feeds anything. Nothing in this chain has reached FID.
What this signals for Baltic hydrogen ecosystem stakeholders
On paper, Liepāja now has the most complete Power-to-X set-up in the Baltics. Hydrogen, CO₂, bioethanol and the conversion technology all have a named partner in one zone. The feedstock question has stopped being a risk and become a workstream, and that is the kind of thing offtakers and EU funding windows actually respond to. And the regulatory pull has a date on it. The 2030 eSAF target is four years out, and the number of European projects that could supply it is small.
We will keep following this in our Baltic PtX project coverage. What to watch for next is not another MoU. It is a site, a permit and a financing announcement for the ethanol plant. That is when the loop actually closes.
Sources: Vienojas par sadarbību bioetanola ražošanā no Latvijas mežsaimniecības atlikumiem