American Ethanol's catamaran hits 176 mph, retakes Lake of the Ozarks Shootout top spot
Don Onken's American Ethanol team put its black-and-yellow Mystic catamaran back on top at the 2026 Lake of the Ozarks Shootout. In the week before the event the crew posted a video of the boat running 176 mph in a test, and it ran clean on its new quad QSC quad-cam ProCharged engines. That matters less for the stopwatch than for who pays for it. The boat exists to keep corn ethanol in front of a crowd, and this year the crowd got a fast one.
The Shootout
For US corn growers and the ethanol plants that buy their crop, the Shootout is a billboard. Onken's team only races this one event, and in recent years it showed up thrashing to make the start line. This year the boat was sorted days early, running smoothly on the new engines while fans expected the usual last-minute scramble.
Good optics for a fuel that still fights the "it'll wreck your engine" reputation at the pump. A 176-mph catamaran on ethanol is the answer growers want normal drivers to see.
None of that moves your rack. It's marketing, and it's the biggest US biofuels story of the week, which tells you how quiet the domestic side was. This batch of news carried no new RFS volumes, no RIN print worth reporting, and no fresh California LCFS action.
India's labelling fight
Most of the week's biofuels news came from overseas, and for a US jobber it's background. India's Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a petition demanding that every pump display the exact percentage of ethanol in its petrol and print it on the bill. The bench of Justices MM Sundresh and PB Varale sent advocate Narendra Kumar Goswami to the high court instead. The government's attorney general, R Venkataramani, called it proxy litigation and pointed out that a similar plea had already been tossed.
Why a US operator might glance at it: India is blending toward higher ethanol content fast, and drivers there are pushing back over mileage and disclosure. US retailers had a version of the same argument with E15 and blender-pump stickers, over what the customer has to be told. India's court ruled the pump does not have to disclose the blend.
Food versus fuel
India also gave the old food-versus-fuel argument fresh legs. Maize pulled into ethanol is pushing up feed costs, and the country's poultry hub is in distress over it. The read for US operators is direct. Corn demand from ethanol firms up basis and can lift feed bills, and that tension never really goes away. Every gallon of mandate lands on someone's cost sheet, usually a livestock guy.
Sunoil into Belgium
Dutch supplier Sunoil Biodiesel got approval to sell biodiesel in Belgium, adding another EU market. For a US hauler this is nothing on price today. It matters only as a marker that European biodiesel demand keeps pulling volume, and that volume competes for the same waste fats and oils that feed US renewable diesel plants. Tight global feedstock is what eventually shows up in a renewable diesel cost, if it shows up at all.
Pump prices
Retail moved against buyers. Chattanooga gas rose nearly 11 cents a gallon over the past week. Diesel stayed under pressure heading into September, with continued global conflicts keeping a floor under it, per South African outlet Smile 90.4FM.
Neither number is biofuels-specific, but blend economics ride on top of the petroleum price. Ethanol gets blended against gasoline; biodiesel and renewable diesel get blended against ULSD. When the diesel barrel firms up, B99 and renewable diesel margins move with it, and a jobber running blends feels the petroleum leg before he feels anything happening in the RIN market.
What to watch
Watch whether the domestic calendar wakes up. This week handed US operators a boat race and a stack of foreign court filings, which leaves the RFS volumes, RIN prices, and any California LCFS move as the things still to land. On feedstock, watch whether European biodiesel demand and India's corn pull tighten fats and oils enough to nudge US renewable diesel costs later this year. At the pump, watch diesel: if the conflict premium holds, blended diesel margins could stay squeezed into the fall, and the Chattanooga move is worth checking against your own region to see if it's local or the front edge of something wider.