How Uzbekistan's SAF Gets to Market: Rail to the Black Sea, Then a Ship

Allied Biofuels FE LLC has signed a Logistics Cooperation Agreement with Pro Logistic Services SIA, a Eurasian multimodal logistics operator, to establish the export route for moving SAF and e-SAF from its Uzbekistan project site to markets in Europe and the Gulf. The agreement was signed at the 5th Tashkent International Investment Forum, and follows the FEED contract Sinopec Engineering signed with Allied Biofuels earlier this month to design the underlying production complex.

About the Route

UAE-bound volumes are planned to move by rail through the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route to Georgian Black Sea ports, then by marine tanker through the Suez Canal to Fujairah. European deliveries are planned to run by rail to the Port of Riga, with onward marine distribution to ports including Hamburg. That is a genuinely long, multimodal chain, landlocked Central Asian production reaching two separate maritime gateways by rail before switching to sea transport, which matters because Uzbekistan's SAF ambitions depend on solving export logistics as much as production technology, given the country itself is doubly landlocked.

What Pro Logistic Services Actually Brings

The company operates a fleet of more than 4,000 wagons and holds direct forwarder contracts with the national railways of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Lithuania, giving it standing rail access across the specific corridor the export route requires without needing to negotiate each national rail leg separately. That existing multi-country rail access is arguably the more commercially significant asset here than the agreement itself, since building equivalent access from scratch would be a multi-year undertaking on its own.

Reading This Against the Underlying Project's Status

The production complex itself remains in the FEED and engineering phase, per Sinopec's contract, with no final investment decision yet announced. Signing the logistics and export framework this early, before FID, signals the project's backers are trying to de-risk the demand and distribution side of the value chain in parallel with engineering, rather than sequentially, which is consistent with the project's broader financing structure: a US$6.08 billion, Presidential Decree-backed initiative with a binding offtake MOU already in place with Uzbekistan Airports.

Why Landlocked SAF Projects Face a Different Calculus

Coastal SAF projects, including most covered elsewhere in this series, can generally rely on direct port access for export. A landlocked project the scale of Allied Biofuels' Uzbekistan complex has to build or contract for an entire rail-to-sea handoff before a single tonne of SAF reaches an international buyer, adding transport cost and complexity that coastal competitors do not face, even where feedstock and production economics are comparable.

Source: GlobeNewswire, 20 July 2026