Louisiana's renewable diesel build-out is shifting where the barrels come from
Louisiana is adding renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel capacity, with carbon capture projects driving the build-out. For US jobbers and haulers, that is the item worth watching. California has been the assumed center of gravity for renewable diesel for years, and a Gulf Coast build-out changes where the barrels come from and how the carbon math on them gets done.
Carbon capture is the reason. Louisiana has the geology for sequestration and the permitting posture to allow it, and a renewable diesel or SAF plant that can bury its process CO2 scores better on carbon intensity than one that can't. Lower CI means more value under California's LCFS and under the federal credit structure, even at Gulf-to-West-Coast distance. Gulf plants also sit next to feedstock logistics and pipeline access that California refiners have to work around.
The practical read for a fuel marketer is supply geography. Renewable diesel is already a real part of the diesel pool on the West Coast, and it has been creeping east on rail and barge. More Gulf production could mean more of it moving out of Gulf Coast terminals and up the Mississippi by barge rather than arriving on a unit train from a converted California refinery. That could change basis and freight assumptions for anyone blending or reselling.
The Gadkari claim
India's transport minister Nitin Gadkari says fuel importers are funding a paid campaign against ethanol, according to BioEnergy Times and ChiniMandi. That is an accusation. No finding backs it up yet. It is aimed at India's domestic blending program.
Why an American jobber should care at all: India is a large and growing ethanol consumer, and its blending mandate is one of the demand-side supports for global ethanol pricing. US ethanol exports have benefited when Indian and other Asian demand runs hot. A political fight that slows India's program could take some pressure off that demand, though there is no evidence yet that anything has actually slowed.
Capacity adds
BCL Industries commissioned a 150 KLPD ethanol unit at Bathinda, taking that site to 550 KLPD. ICAR-IIMR also put out a sugarcane-maize intercropping model meant to feed ethanol supply. Both are Indian feedstock and capacity stories, and both point the same direction: more ethanol supply built inside the country that has been buying it.
Pump prices
Local gas prices in the Chattanooga area rose more than 16 cents a gallon in a week, per the Chattanooga Pulse. One market is one market, but a 16-cent weekly move at retail is the kind of jump that squeezes street margin before it helps it, since rack costs move first and pump prices follow.
What to watch
Watch the Class VI sequestration permits on the Louisiana projects, since the carbon capture piece is what makes the CI numbers work. The other open question is whether India's blending politics turn into an actual policy change or stay rhetoric.