There is a common thread linking agriculture and energy, and linking our transition to that of the African continent. The images presented in the photographic book “Seeds for Energy” show the first stages of a process that began in Venice in 2014 when a traditional refinery was converted into a biorefinery. Today this process opens up to new experiences and opportunities for a fair and inclusive green transition.
In particular, in the Republic of Congo and in Kenya we have initiated projects to rehabilitate degraded land, creating new job opportunities and ensuring market access for local communities, using the skills, experience and innovative solutions already applied in Italy.
The book illustrates the distinctive features of Eni's approach: crops that do not compete with the food chain are cultivated in abandoned areas threatened by climate change and other man-made and environmental factors, valorising them. Under this model, agricultural products flow into agri-hubs, centres for collecting and pressing the seeds produced, from which the extracted oil is then sent to biorefineries. Through vertical integration initiatives, we aim to produce significant quantities of vegetable oil from agri-feedstock in challenging market environments in terms of prices, growing energy demand and availability of sustainable oils.
With the “seeds” of the new energy, we generate long-term value in cooperation with our industrial partners, governments, local research centres and universities. This is the approach we are following to develop agro-industrial supply chains for the production of raw materials for biorefineries, not only in the countries described in this book, but also in Angola, Mozambique, Benin, Rwanda, Ivory Coast, Algeria and Kazakhstan, with the aim of covering 35% of the supply of our biorefineries by 2025.
