Clean Fuels Alliance America is celebrating National Biodiesel Day today and looking ahead to new opportunities for growth.
“Biodiesel helped chart the course for today’s clean fuels market in heavy-duty transportation and opened the doors to applications in rail, marine, Bioheat® fuel and aviation,” said Clean Fuels CEO Donnell Rehagen. “We have built that progress on a proud legacy of clean, homegrown fuel led by our nation’s soybean farms.”
National Biodiesel Day commemorates the birthday of Rudolf Diesel, who invented the diesel engine and predicted the importance of biodiesel more than a century ago. “The use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today, but such oils may become, in the course of time, as important as petroleum and the coal tar products of the present time,” he said in a speech in 1912.
This week, Clean Fuels joined five other trade associations in a letter to President Trump urging him to unleash U.S. biodiesel and renewable diesel production to bolster America’s energy security during the conflict with Iran.
The disruption in the global oil market is constraining diesel fuel supplies, which threatens to raise the cost of all U.S. consumer goods and further harm the U.S. agriculture sector as farmers start this season’s planting. Immediately finalizing the 2026 and 2027 Renewable Fuel Standards would encourage the U.S. clean fuel industry to quickly ramp up enough production capacity to meet 3% of the nation’s demand for diesel, the groups write.
The letter to President Trump is signed by Clean Fuels Alliance America, the American Soybean Association, National Energy & Fuels Institute (NEFI), National Oilseed Processors Association (NOPA), North American Renderers Association (NARA), and U.S. Canola Association, representing the full biomass-based diesel value chain – farmers, feedstock providers, clean fuel producers, and customers.
“The biodiesel, renewable diesel and SAF industry is ready to meet the challenge of providing crucial supplies of diesel fuel free from overseas threats,” the groups write. “The RFS rule should be finalized as quickly as possible. Continued delays in finalizing and publishing the RFS rule would extend market uncertainty for farmers and stakeholders across our value chain as well as exacerbate the recent spike in diesel fuel prices.”