XCF deal would restart 50m-gallon California renewable-fuels refinery

XCF Global has signed a definitive agreement to acquire a renewable-fuels refinery in Paramount, California, proposing a restart that would add about 50 million gallons of annual nameplate capacity for sustainable aviation fuel, renewable diesel and renewable naphtha. The company announced the agreement on 20 October 2026 and said the transaction is expected to close before the end of the year, subject to agreed conditions.

The acquisition would be made through New Rise Renewables Paramount LLC, a newly formed XCF subsidiary. XCF did not disclose the purchase price, the seller, financing terms or the planned split among the three products. It did say that it expects to spend about $30 million on workforce training and operational readiness, more than double the current team, and restart the plant over nine to twelve months.

Original Agrilinkage editorial illustration of renewable-fuels infrastructure and aviation demand. It is not a photograph of the Paramount facility.

The deal would more than double XCF's stated capacity

The proposed addition is material relative to XCF's existing footprint. The company says its New Rise Renewables refinery in Reno, Nevada, has permitted nameplate capacity of up to 38 million gallons a year. Adding the Paramount plant's proposed 50 million gallons would take the combined figure to 88 million gallons if both sites operate at nameplate capacity.

That is a 132% increase over the Reno figure alone. Paramount would represent roughly 57% of the combined total. Those are capacity comparisons, not production forecasts: the California plant is not operating, the transaction has not closed, and XCF has not disclosed a commissioning schedule beyond the nine-to-twelve-month restart window.

Metric	Stated figure	Agrilinkage calculation or reading
Existing Reno nameplate capacity	38 million gallons/year	XCF's current stated base
Proposed Paramount capacity	About 50 million gallons/year	About 132% of the Reno base
Potential combined nameplate	About 88 million gallons/year	Paramount would be about 57% of the total
Planned restart spending	About $30 million	Roughly $0.60 per annual gallon of proposed Paramount capacity

The $0.60 figure is a simple division of the announced restart budget by proposed annual capacity. It is not the acquisition cost per gallon because the purchase price was not disclosed, and it does not include future operating costs, feedstock working capital or any additional capital that may be required after inspection and commissioning.

An existing refinery conversion, not a greenfield promise

The Paramount site has an operating history that predates this transaction. A California Energy Commission project report says AltAir Fuels expanded the converted refinery from 30 million to 40 million gallons a year, installing additional reactors, heat exchangers, vessels and hydrogen infrastructure. The report says the plant demonstrated production at 40 million gallons a year and supplied renewable jet fuel to commercial aviation in 2016.

That history matters because the economics of restarting existing tanks, pipework, utilities and logistics can differ sharply from building a new refinery. The California report described the original project as a brownfield retrofit that reused petroleum-processing equipment, operational expertise and permits. XCF says the present site also includes refining, blending and storage assets, rail and truck terminals, and interests in more than 65 miles of pipelines. Those current asset claims have not been independently itemised in the announcement.

Why agricultural feedstocks are central

XCF says it plans to use its partnership with commodities trader BGN to supply feedstock and purchase the finished fuels. It describes the operation as using domestic agricultural waste products, but it has not published expected feedstock volumes, suppliers, contract durations or a detailed raw-material mix.

The potential feedstock basket is broad. The US Environmental Protection Agency's approved pathways include soybean oil, oils from annual cover crops, algae, biogenic waste oils, fats and greases, camelina oil and distillers corn oil for renewable diesel and jet-fuel production under specified processes. Which materials Paramount actually uses will affect input costs, lifecycle emissions, regulatory credits and the plant's relationship with food, feed and waste-oil markets.

That distinction is commercially important. Waste oils can carry attractive carbon-intensity characteristics but are finite and actively competed for. Crop-derived oils are more scalable in some regions but expose refiners to commodity-price movements and closer scrutiny of land-use and lifecycle assumptions. A refinery's nominal capacity therefore says little about margins until feedstock supply, product yields, policy credits and offtake pricing are known.

How large is the project in the US SAF build-out?

The US Department of Energy's Alternative Fuels Data Center says the federal SAF initiative targets three billion gallons of domestic consumption in 2030 and 35 billion gallons in 2050, alongside at least a 50% lifecycle-emissions reduction. A 50-million-gallon plant equals about 1.7% of the 2030 target; XCF's potential combined 88-million-gallon nameplate would equal about 2.9%.

Those percentages are upper-bound capacity comparisons, not a contribution forecast. Paramount is designed to make several products, so its full 50 million gallons cannot be treated as SAF. Actual output will depend on product economics, technical yields, certifications, feedstock availability and customer commitments.

Management targets require caution

XCF says the enlarged platform could support annual targets of $600 million in gross product sales, $100 million in net revenue and $40 million in EBITDA after the restart. The company defines gross product sales as the estimated end-market value of finished fuels, which is not the same as revenue recognised by XCF. The announcement does not provide a purchase price, pro forma balance sheet, contracted sales volumes or a bridge from capacity to those targets.

Readers should therefore treat the targets as management projections rather than transaction facts. The more decision-useful near-term evidence will be whether the agreement closes, whether XCF discloses financing and the seller, how much additional capital is required, and whether binding feedstock and offtake contracts support the planned operating rate.

What to watch next

The closing deadline before the end of 2026 is the first test. After that, investors, customers and agricultural suppliers will need a clearer restart timetable, workforce and permitting milestones, the certified feedstock pathways, and the planned product mix. Monthly throughput and yield data would show whether the site is moving from nominal capacity to commercial operation.

The transaction's industrial logic is plausible: reuse an established renewable-fuels site near a major aviation market and connect it to a feedstock and offtake partner. But the undisclosed acquisition price, idle-asset restart risk and absence of product-level contracts leave the economics incomplete. The distinction between an acquired facility, a restarted facility and a reliably producing facility will determine whether the proposed scale translates into supply.