Follow the 10-inch pipeline that stretches south from Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport, and after 13 miles you’ll find yourself at a potentially major future hub for sustainable aviation fuel in the upper Midwest.
In a deal announced in September, the Koch Industries-owned Pine Bend Refinery in Rosemount, Minnesota, would receive sustainable aviation fuel (SAF)—fuel made using nonpetroleum feedstocks, like renewable materials or waste—blend it into its conventional jet fuel, and send the fuel mix through the pipeline to the airport, where it will be used by Delta Airlines and other carriers.
The proponents of the project, including its financial backers Deloitte and Bank of America, said last year that up to 60 million gallons of blended fuel, containing potentially up to 50 percent SAF, would be flowing by 2025, and they aim to produce 1 billion gallons of SAF per year, which would surpass the demand at the Minneapolis airport and make the hub a producer for additional airports around the country and potentially the world. (There is no time frame for the refinery to hit this larger target.)
But this project—and others like it—depends on financial-support frameworks like tax credits or loans that were set out under the Biden administration’s signature 2022 climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and which now may be taken away.
Late last month, Montana Renewables, one of only a few US SAF producers—and the planned provider of the first batches for the Minnesota hub—said that the first $782 million tranche of a $1.67 billion loan from the Department of Energy was undergoing a “tactical delay to confirm alignment with White House priorities.” (US senator Steve Daines of Montana said on February 11 that the funding, which is factored into finance the project, has since been unfrozen.)
Federal incentives like this are “on life support” under the Trump administration, says Scott Irwin, a professor of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois. According to Irwin, the Trump administration has so far shown it is willing to completely dismantle the Inflation Reduction Act and its funding, even if it means clawing back promises to farmers and businesses that have already begun implementing climate-smart work.
While state incentive programs along with low-carbon fuel standards still support SAF production, Irwin does not see who could step in to replace the federal government in the credit stack if the funding is withdrawn. “Without the incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, SAF is dead in the water,” he says.
The Refinery Math Already Didn’t Add Up
Late last year WIRED spoke to Jake Reint, vice president of external affairs for Flint Hills Resources, the company within Koch Industries that owns Pine Bend and several other refineries, petrochemical plants, and pipelines. (Flint Hills is the company that struck the deal with Delta and other corporate partners to use the blended fuel from Pine Bend.) Even before Donald Trump was reelected, Reint articulated the challenges of ramping up the SAF industry.
Under the plan, Pine Bend will offload the SAF produced elsewhere from trucks operated by Shell, the distributor in the arrangement, and then blend it with its existing jet fuel mix. This will require Pine Bend to order specialty pumps that Reint says won’t be delivered for a year—and they can’t be ordered until a thorough planning process is completed, including precise estimates for short-term demand.
One also has to factor in the possibility that something could go wrong with the project implementation, Reint says, “because we’re in phase zero.”
He added that the refinery would initially be blending in only small amounts of SAF—“We might sprinkle it in at 10 percent,” he says—and expressed a bearish view on producing a commodity that’s far more expensive than conventional jet fuel. “We will do our part in the supply chain,” he said, “but we’re going to be an honest broker.”
In an email in February, Reint said the refinery is still making progress on the blending facility and expects to have the initial phase online later this year or in early 2026.
Building and operating a refinery is a notoriously difficult business, and to reach its stated goal of 1 billion gallons per year, the Minnesota hub will need to incorporate several new production facilities making SAF from new feedstocks. Meanwhile, the SAF and wider clean fuels industries were hit with some major failures involving marquee investors in 2024—the Fulcrum Bioenergy bankruptcy, for example—leading many to take an even more cautious approach to the sector.
The US Could Fall Behind in the SAF Race
The uncertainty caused by Trump means that investment fund Kerogen Capital is looking to make SAF development investments in Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East. But Mark Chen, Kerogen’s chief operating officer, believes the demand from airlines for SAF is so great that it could be enough to get the market off the ground, no matter the policy landscape.
“The demand is not regulatory driven,” he says. “Most of the quality SAF producers actually have more demand than they can supply.” He adds that one of Kerogen’s portfolio companies, Hong Kong-based EcoCeres, is completely sold out of its SAF supply, and is planning to build a new plant that would double the company’s capacity—which Chen expects will also sell out.
Growing demand means there will be a race for feedstocks to produce the fuel. Used cooking oils and waste fats are likely to serve as feedstock for the first 3 billion gallons of SAF production, as targeted in the US Federal government’s SAF Grand Challenge—its road map for reaching 100 percent SAF use by 2050. However, those supplies are limited, and to move beyond them at scale the industry will need to use plant-based feedstocks, including new commodities such as camelina. Other companies are producing SAF from hemp, sweet potatoes, or even milk waste.
“It’s incredibly difficult to create a new commodity within the United States,” William Hohenstein, a director at the US Department of Agriculture, said during a panel discussion in September. “It doesn’t happen very often, and the reason it’s so challenging is because the farmers need to be confident that if they’re going to invest in growing a crop that there’s a market, and if you’re going to invest on the industry side, you need to know the feedstock is there.”
The US could theoretically achieve the amount of renewable biomass resources required to meet the milestones of the SAF Grand Challenge, according to a report from the US Department of Energy. But the emergence of viable feedstocks and energy crops will need to overcome challenges like finding adequate demand as SAF production grows, pitting energy crops against food crops and finding enough farmland, and a lack of transportation infrastructure.
“It’s not just the farmer and the ultimate consumer. All of the steps along the way: the crushing capacity, the transportation capacity, all of that has to emerge together,” Hohenstein said.
Peter Frosch, the CEO of Greater MSP, a Saint Paul–based nonprofit economic development organization that’s helping to advance the Minnesota SAF hub, takes these challenges in stride.
He said that, so far, forming the SAF demand consortium with Delta, Bank of America, Deloitte, and Ecolab, as well as having the blending facility infrastructure in the works, has helped to attract interest from project developers and additional potential off-takers. One of those partners, DG Fuels, in October announced a new $5 billion plant in Moorhead, Minnesota, that will eventually produce 193 million gallons of SAF per year using corn stover and timber waste as feedstock. It will flow through the Pine Bend refinery.
“There are a thousand reasons this isn’t going to work,” Frosch says, rattling off a laundry list of challenges the hub is facing: getting enough farmers to grow a new crop or change their farming practices; auditing the carbon intensity of the sustainable fuels; the availability of state and federal incentives; bringing in additional investment and production partners.
In an emailed statement, Frosch says that potential changes to tax credits or the DOE’s Loan Programs Office have not directly impacted the Minnesota hub’s conversations with potential SAF producers, but he adds that the uncertainty in Washington “does not support rapid and confident decisionmaking.”
The hub is in talks with producers that “run the gamut of feedstocks and technology, from using wood waste to produce SAF to making it literally out of thin air” through a process involving capturing carbon directly from the atmosphere, he says.
“All of this is hard; that’s the whole idea,” he says. “It’s industrial innovation. We seem to be a little bit on the frontier of doing this at this scale, which means we seem to be encountering some of the big problems that eventually everyone’s going to have to solve.”
