BIOFUELS

of renewable diesel and jet fuel, along with other advanced biofuels, has grown 44 percent to more than 278 million gallons in September, according to Environmental Protection Agency data.

Driving the growth in part are cost reductions in what remains a fairly new technology in converting waste cooking oils into fuel. With greater attention from industry, chemical catalysts have been improved and inefficiencies in the production process worked out, said Blake Simmons, director of biological systems and engineering

at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

“There’s been a flood of funding for research. It was going to have an effect. It was just amatter of when,” he said. “Now you’re seeing these technologies scale up because the cost curves have shifted down. There’s technology maturation.”

With the recent growth, some renewable fuel refineries are even reporting difficulty getting used cooking oil and animal fats, which have relatively low carbon footprints and are more desirable than virgin feedstocks such as soybean oil.

With the coronavirus shuttering many restaurants, cooking oil

is getting particularly hard to find, said Michael McAdams, president of the Advanced Biofuels Association, a trade group.

“The feedstock issue is tricky and something we’re going to have to see if we have the ability to scale up,” he said. “The best hope is if we can broaden the feedstocks available.”

To that end, refiners are looking at turning tree trimmings and municipal waste into fuel, providing them with amuch larger feedstock that has an even lower carbon footprint than waste cooking oils.

Marathon already has a deal with a Nevada plant that turns municipal waste into a synthetic

crude that can be converted into transportation fuel. And the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection is examining the possibility of setting up mobile “bio refineries” in the woods to process tree trimmings, adding a financial incentive for wildfire management, Simmons said.

“There’s a lot of interest in nations dealing with wildfire risk,” he said.

But for all the recent interest, there are questions whether refiners will stay committed to biofuels once a coronavirus vaccine is distributed and fuel demand presumably returns to normal.

CVR Energy, for instance, is holding out the possibility of converting its new biofuels units back into crude refining units.

Speaking to analysts in September, Lamp, the CEO, said returning the units to oil refining was fairly simple, just requiring the switching out of some chemical catalysts that convert crude and their biologic alternatives into fuel.

“The way we’re viewing it is, it’s an option,” he said. “We don’t want to burn any bridges to go back to refining.”

David Paul Morris / Bloomberg Refiners are turning to biofuels and the valuable government credits that come with them to prop up sagging revenues.