If Northwest Advanced Bio-Fuels has its way, the Port of Longview may soon have a $2.4 billion sustainable aviation fuel plant.
But the megaproject to turn timber waste into jet fuel has faced a slew of challenges on its way to landing at the giant riverfront Barlow Point site, a deal that’s still not inked after nearly four years.
The people behind Northwest Advanced Bio-Fuels say the project is mere weeks away from finding the financing needed to lock in a site and build the plant — the first of a handful of additional facilities around the region to fulfill Delta Airlines’ immense need for sustainable aviation fuel.
To port officials, however, the project is one of about 20 that have considered its flagship Barlow Point site, any one of which could put money down today and start the long process of realizing a megaproject there tomorrow.
Northwest Advanced Bio-Fuels has considered Barlow Point — a 282 acre industrial site on the western-most tip of Longview — since 2022, but acquiring the funding to finalize the deal has been difficult, said project leader Dave Smoot.
“This funding is really drastically needed by the project, and it will kick-start everything,” he said. “We’ve got all the funding for the project lined up by multiple players wanting to do it. We actually have Stonepeak signed. But the fact is that $65 million is holding everything up — the whole $2.5 billion.”
New York-based investment firm Stonepeak did not respond to requests to confirm a $600 million investment it made in 2021 is still active.
Port of Longview Director of Business Development Christian Clay said the projects that port officials consider usually take a few weeks to lock in an agreement and put money down — not years.
A July story in the Puget Sound Business Journal first broke the news that Northwest Advanced Bio-Fuels’ project was nearing reality on the Columbia “in the coming weeks.”
That month, the company also celebrated a new financial strategy to sign the exclusivity agreement for Barlow Point and start the 18-month site investigation period of the proposed project in October.
The strategy would secure the needed $65 million through an insurance policy to cover the risk the lender would take on, Smoot said.
“We’ve got multiple world-class multibillion-dollar companies that want to do the DevCap funding. They want to see the policy,” Smoot said Sept. 20. “That policy … should be in their hands within one or two weeks.”
However, the agreement had not been signed as of deadline.
Clay added that leaders from about 20 projects have looked at Barlow Point over the years, all of whom could sign anytime.
“(Northwest Advanced Bio-Fuels) could walk in tomorrow with a signed (exclusivity agreement) and pay the money to take the property off the market, and we would do that,” he said. “Until that happens, there’s nothing.”
In 2019, Delta announced a $2 million partnership with Northwest Advanced Bio-Fuels for a feasibility study to assess whether the plant the company was planning — then set to be located near Grays Harbor — could supply sustainable aviation fuel for the airline’s West Coast operations.
Only months later, the aviation giant finalized what it called “one of the largest airline offtake agreements of its kind” to buy the fuel from Smoot’s company — if it succeeded. Delta anticipated production by the end of 2024, it said in the news release.
A spokesperson for Delta said the partnership is still current.
Smoot continued to stack up victories into 2021, with the project securing $600 million in financing and being celebrated by the Biden White House that year.
But the company’s fortunes changed around that time, and it has struggled to secure development capital funding to get the project off the ground.
In 2022, the company announced a “blockchain technology”-based method for securing that money. The partner company, World Class Holdings LLC appears to have since folded: Its website is dead with its domain name available for purchase, and its manager does not have the company listed on his LinkedIn, which was last updated five months ago.
“I’m not even sure about that, who that is,” Smoot said when asked about the company.
He added the project has had five contracts to secure the funding that have fallen through for various reasons.
“We were forced to start dealing with private individuals, family offices and high net-worth individuals, and that’s just been a circus,” he said.
At a 2021 kickoff meeting for the project, Smoot also fired the project’s lead contractor after it announced delays, he said.
The project quickly landed a new contractor. But Northwest Advanced Bio-Fuels officials decided around that time that they needed a new site after learning the Grays Harbor location was too small, Smoot said.
“We walked from that site and started going south, and that’s when we started negotiating with other locations in Longview,” he said. “We looked at over 30-something sites.”
The project had “more than eight letters of intent” from companies willing to supply the wood material for the plant along the Columbia, according to a late-2024 profile of the project.
Smoot and two senior staffers did not provide those agreements to The Daily News, saying they’re protected by nondisclosure agreements, typical for business relationships in early stages.
Timber giant Rayonier, which Smoot mentioned as a potential partner, expressed enthusiasm for biomass projects to The Daily News but declined to comment on any involvement with the project.
Two other timber companies Smoot mentioned did not respond to requests for comment.
Smoot said the company started seriously investigating four Columbia River sites around 2021.
“There’s probably three, four, five sites in all of the Pacific Northwest where this project could be built,” said Smoot.
That’s because the plant would need a huge plot of land, as well as access to large amounts of wood material and a deep-water port to barge it in. That port berth would also let Delta barge out the finished fuel to its West Coast hubs, including SeaTac.
Northwest Advanced Bio-Fuels found Port of Longview’s Barlow Point site around 2022, Smoot said, which Clay confirmed.
Another local option was the former Reynolds Metals site in Longview. An offer to buy the massive site ultimately fell apart when two sides couldn’t reach an agreement because of continuing clean-up the site may require, Smoot said.
By then, it was 2024, and the project looked across the river to Port Westward in Clatskanie, but zoning turned out to be an issue this time, Smoot said, which the port also confirmed.
So the project team returned to Longview’s Barlow Point site.
“We were still negotiating the site that we’re gonna end up with,” Smoot said of Barlow Point. “We’ve been after it for three years. We wanted both sites. We’re gonna do more than one project. So this became our primary site when the other sites didn’t work out.”
Clay confirmed the company is still in contact.
And the Port of Longview is interested — if Northwest Advanced Bio-Fuels can get that $65 million.
“We explore permitting, regulatory, engineering and design, ‘does the project fit on that site?’ — that kind of stuff,” Dale Lewis, director of external affairs for the port, said. “But, yes, we would definitely be interested if they had financing.”
