White House pushes year-round E15 and $11 billion in farm aid in spending bill

The White House is asking Congress to write year-round E15 into a spending bill, bundled with $11 billion in farm aid. That moves the fight off the EPA's annual waiver treadmill and onto a permanent legislative footing, which is what the ethanol lobby has wanted for a decade. The National Corn Growers Association cheered the Trump administration's continued backing, and you can see why. A summer sales ban that disappears by statute is worth far more to a blender than another one-year reprieve granted in May.

The catch is the vehicle. Farm aid and fuel policy riding the same bill means E15 lives or dies with the broader spending fight, and those bills get stripped and traded in conference.

Indonesia

Indonesia started rolling out B50 biodiesel, a 50 percent blend, with state agency BPDP framing it as an energy-security play. That is an aggressive jump from the B35 mandate already on the books, and it pulls a lot of palm oil out of the export market.

The price tape agrees. Palm climbed for a second straight session on strong exports plus the mandate news. Higher palm feeds straight into global vegoil costs, which matters to US biodiesel and renewable diesel margins because soybean oil trades in the same complex. When Jakarta burns more of its own feedstock, US producers pay up for theirs.

SAF

Sustainable aviation fuel had a rough day for partnerships. Sasol and Topsoe dissolved Zaffra, the joint venture they built to push SAF, and recast the relationship as a narrower licensing arrangement. Two serious players walking back a dedicated JV says the economics still do not pencil at scale.

KBR went the other direction, landing the FEED and licensing work for a SAF plant in Singapore. So the engineering money keeps flowing even as the marquee partnerships shrink.

There was also a report on palm oil fraud tied to SAF feedstock and its real greenhouse-gas math. If used cooking oil and palm residues feeding SAF turn out to be virgin palm in disguise, the carbon accounting that justifies the whole product falls apart, and regulators in the EU are already watching for it.

What to watch

Whether E15 survives conference is the near-term question, and a permanent fix changes how blenders plan summer supply. Watch Indonesia's B50 timeline for slippage, since B35 itself ran behind schedule at the start. On SAF, watch whether more JVs follow Zaffra into the licensing-only column, and whether the feedstock-fraud reporting forces tighter origin rules that could choke supply before the plants KBR is designing ever run.