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Sustainable jet fuel company plans multibillion-dollar plant in Longview

A sustainable aviation fuel tanker truck. Northwest Advanced Bio-Fuels expects to produce 60 million gallons of SAF annually at the facility it's planning in Longview. (Kim Ohman | Neste)

Nick Pasion

By Nick Pasion – Reporter, Puget Sound Business Journal

Story Highlights

  • Northwest Advanced Bio-Fuels plans 200-acre sustainable aviation fuel facility in Longview.
  • Company mitigates financial risk through insurance underwriter partnership for funding.
  • Facility expected to produce 60 million gallons of SAF annually.

A sustainable aviation fuel company is eyeing a site on the Columbia River in Cowlitz County for a multibillion-dollar production facility — and a new way to fund it that limits risk for investors.

Northwest Advanced Bio-Fuels, which uses wood residue from logging operations to produce biofuel for aircraft, wants to build an over-200-acre facility in Longview that it hopes will lead to hundreds of jobs, Dave Smoot, the company’s founder, said.

In recent years, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) facilities have popped up across Washington as companies look to leverage the state’s aerospace industry, environmental subsidies and cheap power to produce what many hope to be greener fuel for commercial jets.

Many SAF projects, however, struggle to get off the ground due to the financial risk that comes with spending lots of money to build large fuel facilities that produce biofuels that have yet to be used on a wide scale.

Smoot said his company is mitigating this risk by partnering with an insurance underwriter. The idea is to create a repayment guarantee for backers of the development, making it easier for the project to draw funding where others have stalled.

Already, NWABF has drawn funding from Delta Air Lines, which spent about $2 million on a feasibility study in 2019 and has agreed to purchase the fuel once the plant is operational — but the deal makes it easier for other funders to climb aboard, too, Smoot said.

“It’s a labor of love. I mean, we know what we’ve got,” he said. “We know the outside, the benefits to everybody, and it’s going to be profitable, we’ve got a really good contract, really good airline, and there’s going to be more — we’re talking to other airlines.”

Molly Bruce Photography

Dave Smoot is the principal and founder of Northwest Advanced Bio-Fuels. (Molly Bruce)

The startup initially planned a facility in Grays Harbor County in 2019 but the site was “too small,” Smoot said. So NWABF looked about 100 miles southeast to Longview, where it plans to lease property from the Port of Longview.

Smoot said a 29-year lease is in the works, following a due diligence period. An official announcement should come in the weeks ahead. The port did not return a request for comment.

The plant is expected to be operational by the third quarter of 2029 and produce more than 60 million gallons of SAF per year, according to a press release.

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Smoot said the companyhas a deal with an unnamed investor for the first $15 million and then will need to raise an additional $50 million to help fund development. In all, the company has commitments for $2.4 billion to build the plant, split between equity and debt.

NWABF projects the facility will create about 1,000 temporary construction jobs and up to 200 full-time roles in and around the site, according to the release. To create the fuel, the company is in talks with some local Native American tribes to access their spare timber.

Smoot said the Scottsdale, Arizona-based company is already in talks for a second site in Washington and will use a similar financial underwriting structure. While he couldn’t publicly disclose backers or locations, he said NWABF was eyeing lots in Eastern Washington — a shift in attitude for the company.

“When we came up (to Washington), we were nervous as hell,” Smoot said. “It was a rightful nervous. They had reputation (that) that’s where projects go to die. Nothing got permitted. They all died on the vine.”

But he said that state legislation passed in recent years — including subsidies for SAF, expedited permitting and a more ambitious threshold for meeting the state’s clean-fuel standard — has made him more optimistic about future investment.

“Look at what Washington has done to help us in recent years,” Smoot said.

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