By Avi Salzman
The Biden administration said this week it is making large loans to private factories that turn animal fats and plants into cleaner jet fuel, boosting the stocks of two niche players in the industry. It's the first good news for biofuel companies in a while, though it's still not enough to make the industry a consistently profitable growth engine.
The stocks of the two companies in question, Gevo and Calumet, jumped on the news. Gevo was up 18% on Thursday. Calumet rose as much as 15%, before giving back those gains and ending the day down 0.3%.
The brief burst of enthusiasm comes amid a downturn in the renewable fuels market. The stocks of larger industry players like Neste Oyj and Darling Ingredients have each fallen more than 20% this year as government subsidies and renewable-fuel credit markets have been weaker than expected, leading to a glut of clean fuel.
Jet flights account for more than 2% of global carbon emissions, and are one of the hardest industries to decarbonize. Electric-powered airplane travel is probably decades away from wide commercial adoption. One way to clean up the industry's emissions is to replace the jet fuel made with fossil fuels with a greener option -- fuel distilled from plants and animals, known as sustainable aviation fuel. Sustainable jet fuel is mixed into traditional jet fuel supplies, so planes that use it are powered by a mix of clean and dirty fuels.
In Gevo's case, the Department of Energy approved a $1.46 billion conditional loan guarantee for the company to build a corn starch-to-jet fuel facility in Lake Preston, S.D. It's expected to be able to produce some 60 million gallons of sustainable jet fuel per year when it's completed, or enough to fill the tanks of roughly 1,000 Boeing 747s.
Calumet already has a facility in Great Falls, Mont., with the capacity to produce about 30 million gallons of sustainable jet fuel per year, more than any other company in the U.S. The Department of Energy will give Calumet a $1.44 billion conditional loan to expand the plant's capacity to 300 million gallons.
While the factory is being expanded over the next four years, Calumet won't have to pay interest on the loan. And the interest rate will be about 4%, well below the approximately 12% cost of capital that the company receives in private markets.
The loan will help Calumet become a "world-scale producer," said CEO Todd Borgmann in an interview. If the plant succeeds, it will get the Biden administration about 10% of the way to its goal of 3 billion gallons of clean jet fuel per year by 2030. Big companies like Exxon Mobil and Phillips 66 are also investing in sustainable aviation fuel, so Calumet will face significant competition.
Nonetheless, the future of sustainable jet fuel remains an open question, in part because the U.S. government hasn't mandated that airlines use it. The cleaner kind of fuel is more expensive to make than the traditional kind. While government subsidies and clean fuel credits cover some of the cost, airlines haven't committed to paying up for it, or to passing those costs along to travelers. At all the major U.S. airlines, less than 0.2% of the jet fuel used last year was sustainable, according to Bloomberg. United Airlines, which says it is the U.S. leader in using sustainable fuels, bought "more than 7 million gallons" of the clean stuff last year. That represented just 0.17% of its total jet fuel.
Europe, by comparison, has mandated that airlines use at least 2% sustainable fuel by next year. Several have already added surcharges to customer tickets to pay for it. Until airlines do more than pay the idea lip service, the companies making the fuel won't have a consistent source of demand. That would be bad news for their results, and their stocks.
Write to Avi Salzman at avi.salzman@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 18, 2024 02:30 ET (06:30 GMT)
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