Vitagro Group will raise EUR110 million in additional investments to develop its biomethane plant in Khmelnytsky region and increase its capacity by 5 million cubic meters by the time biomethane production starts, said Serhiy Savchuk, Vitagro Group’s Director of Development and Investments, at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Berlin on Wednesday.
“We understand that by 2030, 35 million cubic meters of biomethane will be consumed in the EU. That is why we have invested EUR6 million in our first biomethane plant in Ukraine. Yesterday I spoke with our customers in Europe who sell our product to the EU. I sent them a memorandum for additional investments in our biomethane plant,” he said.
According to Savchuk, it is an investment of EUR110 million, which will allow Vitagro to increase biomethane production by 5 million cubic meters per year.
Vitagro’s Director of Development and Investment also said that the group of companies has launched five projects at its own expense since the beginning of the full-scale war. Fertilizer production projects and a corn pellet ethanol plant have now been fully completed.
The VITAGRO group of companies was founded in 1999. In 2021, it employed 5 thousand people, its revenue amounted to $211.3 million, and EBITDA was $101 million.
The group’s land bank is 85 thousand hectares. The group also owns a seed and crop protection plant, as well as sunflower oil production facilities and one of the five largest orchards in Ukraine. VITAGRO also owns 5,000 heads of cattle and 110,000 heads of pigs, elevator capacity of 400,000 tons, as well as three brick factories and nine asphalt plants, and four solar power plants with a total capacity of 16 MW.
VITAGRO’s first pilot biomethane project was presented in June 2023 in Dobrohorscha village in Khmelnytskyi district of Khmelnytskyi region, where a biomethane plant with a capacity of 2.9 million cubic meters per year was built on the basis of a farm and a biogas plant, with investments in the project estimated at EUR 7.6 million. Manure, silage, and straw from the group’s pig and cattle farms will be used for methane production.
VITAGRO also planned to launch two more such plants: “Zorya in Rivne region for 3 million cubic meters and 52 thousand tons of fertilizers with an investment of EUR 7 million and in the former Volochysk district (now Khmelnytsky district) for 2.5 million cubic meters and 100 thousand tons of fertilizers with an investment of EUR 6.8 million.
According to the state register, the main beneficiary of VITAGRO is MP Serhiy Labaziuk, and the CEO is Petro Labaziuk.
