(Corrects information describing commercial restrictions on the Amazon ranch owned by Antonio Luceno Barros. Item 21 inaccurately states that Brazil’s environmental agency Ibama lifted the restrictions due to the expiration of the statute of limitations and that Barros still owes more than $3 million in suspended fines.)
Fabio Teixeira, Manuela Andreoni and Allison Lampert
XINGUARA (Reuters) – A Texas refinery that supplies crude fuel to U.S. airlines is buying animal fat from cattle raised on illegally logged land in the Amazon rainforest, according to a Reuters review of government monitoring data, interviews and eyewitness accounts.
Louisiana-based Diamond Green Diesel, a joint venture between biofuel producer Darling Ingredients and oil refiner Valero Energy, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in a refinery in Port Arthur, Texas that turns cattle fat, called tallow, into a cleaner alternative to petroleum-based jet fuel and diesel.
Diamond Green Diesel is a major player in the US sustainable fuel market. According to the documents, from 2022 it has collected more than $3 billion in tax credits for biofuel production.
However, interviews and documents show that at least two Brazilian factories, which from 2023 supplied Diamond Green Diesel with tens of thousands of tons of cattle fat, some of which comes from slaughterhouses that buy cattle from illegally logged ranches in the Amazon rainforest.
Carriers such as JetBlue and Southwest Airlines, which have struck a deal with Valero to use “green” jet fuel, can claim lower emissions because the Diamond Green Diesel plant is certified under a United Nations agreement to limit aviation’s climate impact, known as CORSIA.
According to the analysis company SkyQuest Technology Group, the global market for sustainable jet fuel is small – in 2025. it will amount to about 2.9 billion USD compared to USD 239 billion But government incentives are expected to help the market grow exponentially, pumping more resources into Brazil’s cattle industry, a major driver of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.
Pedro Piris-Cabez, an economist at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, said any additional demand “could expand herds and directly or indirectly encourage deforestation and forest loss.”
It may also violate Brazilian law. “Companies that profit from raw materials that come from a supply chain that involves deforestation are also responsible for these illegal actions,” said Ricardo Negrini, Brazil’s federal prosecutor, who has launched a series of government investigations into the cattle industry.
Diamond Green Diesel, Darling Ingredients, Valero Energy, Southwest and JetBlue did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including detailed questions about the Brazilian tallow supply chain.
To trace the tallow trade from illegally logged Amazon ranches to Diamond Green Diesel, Reuters partnered with Reporter Brasil, a nonprofit investigative body that helped review court documents linking slaughterhouses to tallow plants, company files, trade data and government cattle tracking records.
Reuters also interviewed more than a dozen people involved at every stage of the beef tallow supply chain, including traders, truckers, prosecutors, auditors and regulators.
Diamond Green Diesel sources its oil from several countries, and Reuters could not determine how much of it came from ranches in illegally cleared Amazon lands.
BOUNCED CATTLE
in 2022 Darling Ingredients CEO Randall Stuewe announced that for $557 million
Reuters found that one of the processing plants in the state of Para, called Araguaia, received beef tallow from at least five meat-packing companies that failed to meet the 2025 deadline. audit by federal prosecutors in May of the slaughter of 20,000 cattle from illegally logged forests.
According to trade data from Import Genius, in 2023 Araguaia exported beef tallow from the Amazon to Diamond Green Diesel for $4.4 million. USD.
In June, a Reuters reporter saw a truck with the Araguaia logo at a San Francisco slaughterhouse that failed to buy cattle from farms on illegally logged forest land.
The truck driver, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters he had been collecting carcasses from a San Francisco slaughterhouse and transporting them to the Araguaia plant for two years. Two other drivers and two San Francisco employees confirmed that the slaughterhouse was Araguaya’s supplier.
San Francisco has neither confirmed nor denied being a supplier to the Araguaia plant. She said that since 2018 is cooperating with federal prosecutors and has hired an outside firm to monitor the supply chain.
According to Brazil’s environmental protection agency Ibama, San Francisco sources some of its cattle indirectly from Vale do Paraiso, a farm where, since 2006, cattle grazing was prohibited because 15 square miles of trees were illegally cleared. Cattle tracking data shows that the cattle were transferred from Vale do Paraiso to a farm with a clean record before they reached the slaughterhouse.
The agency said it lifted the commercial ban on Vale do Paraiso last year after its owner, Antonio Lucena Barros, presented a plan to restore the deforested area. Barros also got a court order to stay more than $3 million in fines, which the agency said it would appeal.
Barroso’s lawyer, Calebe Rocha, said in a statement that his client is fighting the fines in court and has been granted an injunction to stop payment of the fine. He also said that no animals were sold from the part of Vale do Paraiso that Ibama blocked due to deforestation.
Another plant, owned by Darling Ingredients, received fat from a slaughterhouse, which confirmed to Reuters that it had bought hundreds of cattle in 2022 and 2023 from a ranch owned by Bruno Heller, which Brazilian federal police arrested in 2023. described in the study as possibly the largest deforester in the Amazon.
In a statement, Heller’s lawyer, Vinicius Segatto, said Brazil’s environmental law was “too strict” and that the criminal case against his client was still pending.
FAT FOR FUEL
Airlines are under pressure to buy more of the green jet fuel, which is now produced in small quantities, so that by 2050 meet the industry’s target by 2050
Proponents of using tallow as a biofuel say demand alone is unlikely to compel ranchers to cut down rainforests and grow their own pastures because of its economic value of less than 3% of what slaughterhouses get for each animal.
Diamond imports from Brazil have been certified as sustainable by International Sustainability and Carbon Certification (ISCC), a third-party certification body that has approved the CORSIA diamond factory.
To meet the requirements, the biomass used for the fuel cannot come from land that has been logged after 2008 or from protected areas, but ISCC told Reuters it has not investigated Diamond’s supply chain because it believes the tallow is a “by-product” of the CORSIA beef industry.
Three experts who helped develop CORSIA told Reuters the program allows producers to discount carbon emissions and Amazon deforestation scores because demand for tallow is unlikely to encourage farmers to raise herds.
The International Civil Aviation Organization declined to comment when asked whether it considered deforestation in the tallow supply chain a violation of its sustainability standards.
But the agency said it “continually monitors compliance” with third parties responsible for certifying sustainable aviation fuel producers and welcomes information on “any potential deviations” for further evaluation.
(Reporting by FABIO teixeira in Xingara, Manuela Andreoni in Sao Paulo and Allison Lampert in Montreal; Editing by Michael Learmonth)