EcoCeres has signed an Investment Letter of Intent with the Dongguan Municipal People’s Government for a 450,000-tonne-per-annum sustainable aviation fuel and HVO complex in Dongguan, the Towngas-incubated, Bain Capital-controlled producer confirmed in a May 5 announcement. The signing took place in the presence of John Lee, Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and Wei Hao, Secretary of the CPC Dongguan Municipal Committee, alongside EcoCeres co-chairmen Alan Chan and James Tam. Towngas retains a stake; Bain Capital took control of the company in 2022.
The structural pitch is integration rather than scale alone. The Dongguan complex is positioned as the production node of what EcoCeres and Towngas are describing as the Greater Bay Area’s first end-to-end SAF supply chain, with waste-based feedstock collection co-ordinated across the Greater Bay Area, refining in Dongguan, and blending, refuelling and trading anchored in Hong Kong. The pathway is HEFA, and the announcement describes the feedstock as waste-based, citing used cooking oil as the example.
The capacity headline needs careful reading. The release describes Dongguan as approximately 450,000 tonnes per annum of combined SAF and HVO output, with no disclosed product split between the two molecules. The existing Zhangjiagang (350,000 tpa) and Johor (420,000 tpa) figures are similarly published on a combined HEFA-output basis, not as disaggregated SAF nameplate. On a like-for-like combined-HEFA basis, the three sites together would reach approximately 1.22 million tonnes per annum if Dongguan reaches design throughput, but none of those numbers should be read as SAF-only capacity. The release itself describes EcoCeres as “the world’s second-largest SAF producer” — a self-claim that the announcement does not benchmark against named comparators, and which sits in tension with the unresolved SAF-versus-HVO split across all three sites.
“By leveraging Hong Kong’s unique position as an international aviation hub and Dongguan’s solid industrial base, we are confident in building a world-class SAF supply chain in the Greater Bay Area.”
The financial structure of the project has not been disclosed. The agreement is a Letter of Intent rather than a final investment decision, and EcoCeres has not published a project capex figure, an FID date, a construction-start date, or an operational target year. The release does not name an EPC contractor, an offtake partner, or any airline customers for the Dongguan output. EcoCeres claims its 2025 SAF and HVO supply enabled approximately 1.2 million tonnes of lifecycle greenhouse-gas abatement for customers “including airlines and logistics companies,” though the company has not disclosed which lifecycle methodology (CORSIA, RED III, GREET) underpins the figure or named the customers behind it.
The political framing is unusually heavy for a clean-fuels LOI. John Lee tied the project explicitly to the National 15th Five-Year Plan and to what he described as Hong Kong’s executive-led governance model, framing the SAF supply chain as a flagship for Greater Bay Area economic co-ordination rather than a stand-alone industrial investment. Wei Hao similarly positioned Dongguan’s selection as a vote of confidence in the city’s industrial ecosystem. The political weight matters operationally because Greater Bay Area co-ordination, mainland feedstock-collection permissions, and Hong Kong port and blending infrastructure all sit across different jurisdictions, and a cross-boundary clean-fuels supply chain at this scale has not previously been executed in the GBA.
The demand-side case rests on a Hong Kong International Airport 2030 SAF target that the HK SAR Government has signalled but not legislated. The release notes that the project “aligns with the target requiring departing flights at Hong Kong International Airport to use a specified proportion of SAF by 2030.” Without a defined percentage, obligated party, or compliance mechanism, that target is not yet bankable offtake, and a 450,000-tpa greenfield FID financed against it would require either a separate set of binding offtake contracts or a clearer policy instrument than has been published to date. The broader feedstock context is also worth flagging: Asian used cooking oil is the most export-contested HEFA molecule on the market, with US 45Z, EU RED III Annex IX Part B, and California LCFS all incenting the same UCO HEFA pathway. A GBA collection programme co-ordinated through municipal channels could in principle secure feedstock, but EcoCeres has not yet disclosed collection volumes, exclusivity terms, or municipal agreements that would underpin that thesis.
What to watch: the FID date, the disclosure of a project capex figure and financing structure, identification of offtake partners, the SAF/HVO product split at full nameplate, the structure and tonnage of the GBA UCO collection programme, and the timing and scope of the HKIA 2030 SAF target. Until those data points land, the Dongguan announcement is a strategic signal and a political milestone rather than a sanctioned project.
Source: EcoCeres — Hong Kong and Dongguan Governments Advance High-Quality Greater Bay Area Development
