Used cooking oil theft is rising at US restaurants, biodiesel's cheapest feedstock walking out the back door
Buffalo Biodiesel is warning restaurants that thieves are hitting their grease bins, and the trend is climbing. Used cooking oil is one of the feedstocks that goes into biodiesel, and biodiesel is what gets blended into the diesel that haulers buy. When the raw material gets scarcer or pricier, that cost works its way toward the pump. It is a small signal today. It is worth watching because feedstock costs have been the part of diesel pricing that swings the most.
Tallow at freight scale
JBS says one of the heavy trucks in its B100 project passed 500,000 kilometers running the route between Lins, in the interior of São Paulo, and the Port of Santos, with no fossil diesel in the tank. The fuel is made partly from beef tallow, a fat pulled off during animal processing, and partly from used cooking oil. JBS launched the project in 2023, and roughly three years later this truck cleared the half-million mark.
Why a Brazilian meatpacker's truck matters to a US hauler: it is a proof point that tallow and used cooking oil can move real freight over real distance. Those are the same waste streams US biodiesel plants compete for. More demand chasing tallow and grease pulls on the same feedstock pool, which is the same pool the Buffalo Biodiesel thieves are draining. The two stories are connected at the feedstock.
The record-high claim
One report has fuel prices climbing again with diesel near record highs. That print is out of Cyprus, not the US market, so it is not a read on what your drivers are paying this week. A foreign retail number does not set US surcharges. The useful part is only that diesel strength is showing up in more than one market at once. For a US number that actually moves your fuel-surcharge math, wait for the domestic weekly retail diesel figure.
Propane haulers
Fresh LP Gas added a third LPG carrier to its fleet. That is a Bangladesh shipping story with no direct pull on US diesel or freight rates, so it does not change what a US jobber pays. It sits here as a marker that LPG carriers keep getting added to the water.
What to watch
Whether US biodiesel plants report the same feedstock tightness Buffalo Biodiesel is flagging, since that is the channel from grease-bin theft to blended-diesel cost. Whether the diesel strength showing up overseas turns up in the next US retail diesel print. And whether more heavy-truck operators follow JBS toward tallow and used cooking oil, which would put more bidders on the feedstock haulers already depend on.