Houston Brief: feedstock, finance, standards and offtake in one room

The third and final IFFW City Brief took place on 3 November 2026 at The Westin Houston Downtown. Eight talks and a panel ran across one afternoon, and the running order followed a molecule from policy and markets, through compliance and plant design, to standards and the buyer. It was also US Election Day, which gave the afternoon's policy questions an extra dimension.

Opening: why one sector can't solve this alone

Gabriel Ho, Executive Director of IFFW, opened with the argument behind International Future Fuels Week: aviation, maritime and land transport draw on the same limited pool of feedstock, capital and certification capacity. Treat them separately and they bid against each other for a fixed supply. Treat them together and the question becomes how to grow that supply. Every session that followed tested some part of that claim.

Gerard Ostheimer, Molecule Group: putting the "I" in IFFW

Gerard Ostheimer, CEO of Molecule Group and Secretariat of the Biofuture Industry Council, started at the top of the policy stack with the Belém 4x Pledge, launched at COP30 to quadruple sustainable fuel production and use by 2035. The pledge covers biofuels, biogases, synthetic fuels and hydrogen, and rests on IEA analysis showing a fourfold increase is achievable if existing and announced policies are actually implemented. Signing is a political signal; it doesn't commit a country to new measures.

The gaps matter. Around two dozen countries backed it, including Canada, India, the Netherlands, Singapore and the UAE, but Australia, China, France, South Africa and the US have not.

Implementation now sits with the Clean Energy Ministerial, working with the COP30 presidency and the IEA, and a COP31 roundtable in Antalya on 10 November will mark the pledge's first year and launch the IEA's tracking report. His proposal for Singapore was concrete: use IFFW in June 2027 as a milestone where ministers and industry set out how book-and-claim, paired with green corridors, can build demand and move volume. Bilateral lanes such as Brazil to Rotterdam or Houston to Singapore were his examples of how market trust gets built one route at a time.

Fanny Roldan, S&P Global Energy: the latest biofuels outlook

Fanny Roldan, Associate Director at S&P Global Energy CERA Consulting, sized the opportunity. Global liquid petroleum fuel demand runs at about 940 billion gallons a year, and biofuels account for roughly 3.2% of it. That share falls to 0.8% in jet and effectively zero in marine fuel.

On road, US gasoline demand has peaked as efficiency improves and EVs take share. Moving to E15 would broadly hold US road ethanol demand steady to 2040, but wouldn't grow it. Growth has to come from aviation and marine.

On SAF, demand climbs steadily to 2050 against a capacity base that flattens if nothing new is built, and new plants typically take about five years to come online. Europe accounted for 51% of 2025 SAF demand, North America 39% and Asia 10%. US West Coast margins turned sharply positive in 2026 as the Middle East conflict lifted fossil jet prices, but Roldan was clear that alcohol-to-jet remains structurally dependent on subsidy because of its higher capital intensity.

On marine, compliance will drive biobunker demand. Biofuels drop into existing engines, unlike LNG, which needs new vessels and infrastructure, and Maersk has already tested 100% US ethanol in Houston. Alternative fuels make up about 5% of the vessel order book.

Her closing frame: the biofuel policies that last are the ones that align farm and rural economies, energy security and climate goals at the same time. In the US, that alignment is now putting producers, refiners and agribusiness in the same conversations in a way that would have been unlikely five years ago.

Kristine Klavers, EcoEngineers: from project to credits

Kristine Klavers, Managing Director at EcoEngineers, delivered the afternoon's bluntest line: 99% compliance equals 100% non-compliance. A plant can run perfectly and still earn nothing if one eligibility condition fails.

Her case study was Norway, where tallow-based biofuel claiming double counting between 2017 and 2023 was verified by an accounting firm rather than a biofuel specialist. Under the EU's Annex IX, only fats never intended for food or feed qualify for double counting. The problem surfaced in 2024, and Klavers put the potential exposure, if assessed today, above $1 billion.

The details differ market by market. The US RFS requires a 50% GHG reduction, Europe 65% to 70%, CORSIA 10%. Palm is excluded in the US, Canada and Europe; soy is excluded in Europe. Each jurisdiction runs its own LCA model and treats indirect land use change differently. Co-processing is capped at 5% under ASTM, and some refiners struggle above 3%. A new California pathway can take up to two years to approve. Europe relies on ISCC and RSB, while US buyers expect QAP coverage that traces UCO back to individual restaurant collections.

The Q&A turned to interoperability. Klavers sees coordination between industry and government weakening. One participant noted that 45Z regulates producers while CORSIA regulates aircraft operators, so the frameworks were never designed to line up, and CORSIA and IMO processes both depend on country approvals that move slowly.

Sachin Joshi, Velocys: Fischer-Tropsch in deployment

Sachin Joshi, Chief Commercial Officer at Velocys, started from SkyNRG's outlook: HEFA dominates supply to 2030, but a gap of about 27 Mt opens by 2035, and Fischer-Tropsch is the pathway most likely to fill it. The chemistry is proven at coal- and gas-to-liquids scale. The question now is whether FT can be deployed reliably, bankably and repeatedly on biomass and waste.

Dispersed feedstock, lower technology readiness in syngas generation, integration risk and the trade-off between offtake volume and contract length all push towards smaller plants. Projects in development range from 50 to 2,500 barrels a day, with Joshi putting the economic sweet spot at around 1,000 to 1,500. A 10,000 bpd ambition becomes five 2,000 bpd trains.

His central point was that projects fail at the interfaces, not the process units: syngas quality, battery limits, heat and utilities, controls and turndown, product upgrading, guarantees. Those need resolving in engineering, not discovering in commissioning. The licence is the start, not the finish.

Velocys's Envia plant in Oklahoma City ran on landfill gas at 200 bpd, logged more than 6,000 hours across two commercial-scale reactors and produced 450,000 gallons of renewable fuel. It then switched to RNG because methane was worth more than the liquids, which says as much about policy signals as about technology. Joshi's route to scale: standardise, modularise, replicate.

Surya Guduru, Emvolon: scale out, not up

Surya Guduru, Head of Strategy and Business Development at Emvolon, took the small-scale argument further. The US has 2,585 operating biogas systems and room for 17,000 more, mostly at farms and wastewater plants. Only 16% of dairies with 500 or more head have a digester. Interconnection costs are largely fixed regardless of volume and pipeline costs scale with distance, so small sites lose.

He set this against large e-methanol bets that have stalled: HIF's planned 1.4 Mt a year Matagorda project, 90 miles from Houston, whose site was sold to a data-centre developer in July 2026; Liquid Wind's bankruptcy in May 2026; Ørsted's cancelled FlagshipONE. One $500 million plant carries one policy regime and one FID. Sites at $5 to 20 million each can be built to current rules, and a single policy change can't sink them all.

Emvolon's unit uses a mass-produced engine run fuel-rich as the reformer, turning methane into syngas and then methanol at 5 to 50 tonnes a day, with a payback of about four years. Methanol leaves by truck, rail or barge and sells into an existing market of roughly 100 Mt a year, starting with specialty chemicals and pharmaceuticals and moving towards marine as dual-fuel fleets grow. The first commercial unit, at the Atascocita landfill in Humble, Texas, with Montauk Renewables, is expected online in the first half of 2027 at 4,000 to 5,000 tonnes a year. The joint venture targets up to 50,000 tonnes a year by 2030, and Freepoint Commodities holds a seven-year purchase framework worth

more than $450 million, with co-investment rights.

Danielle Martin, Gevo: performance, premiums and scale

Danielle Martin, Business Development Manager at Gevo, argued that commercialisation doesn't always begin with volume. Sometimes it begins with value.

Gevo runs a low-carbon ethanol plant with carbon capture and storage in Richardton, North Dakota, a dairy-manure RNG operation in Iowa and its Verity tracking platform, and is developing the ATJ-30 project on the North Dakota site. Martin pointed to Rystad analysis showing HEFA SAF feedstock requirements overtaking available UCO by 2035, before road and marine demand is counted. Alcohol-to-jet, which can run on any fermentable sugar, widens the base.

The bridge to that scale is premium markets. Motorsport is the clearest: MotoGP requires 100% non-fossil fuel across all classes from 2027, Formula 1 targets net zero by 2030, and Gevo signed a purchase agreement with Shell in August 2024 for hydrocarbons from its technology. Racing makes performance visible and builds supply chains and operating experience. In the Q&A Martin was candid that Gevo isn't yet at commercial scale in these markets, that recreational marine pricing remains a barrier at demonstration volumes, and that earlier xylene work didn't pan out.

Gregory Dolan, Pivot Methanol: a future-proof fuel

Gregory Dolan, Principal at Pivot Methanol and former CEO of the Methanol Institute, closed the first half. Global methanol demand is around 85 Mt this year, down from a typical 90 Mt, after the Middle East conflict cut monthly methanol crossings through the Strait of Hormuz from about 1.1 Mt to around 300,000 tonnes. Spot prices spiked in Asia, then elsewhere, and are rising again.

The low-carbon pipeline looks large on paper: 287 projects and 62.8 Mt announced by 2032. Only 8% has reached FID and 11% is at FEED, and GENA Solutions puts realistic capacity at 6 to 12 Mt by 2031 given policy uncertainty.

Demand is building in three places. In shipping, more than 400 methanol-capable vessels are in service or on order, a large container ship needs 35,000 to 40,000 tonnes a year, and around 48 ports now bunker methanol, Singapore and Houston among them. In aviation, ASTM revised D7566 in July 2026 to accept methanol as a feedstock under the alcohol-to-jet annex at up to 50% blend, though every methanol-to-jet project is still pre-FID. On road, China runs about 60,000 methanol vehicles and 1,500 M100 stations, while RED III opens a European route through blending and biodiesel feedstock.

Christopher McCullough, ASTM International: the standards behind the fuels

After the break, Christopher McCullough, General Manager, Program Development, Laboratory Services at ASTM International, explained the clock every project timeline runs against. ASTM has more than 13,000 standards and 35,000 members in 150-plus countries, but it is a forum, not an approver: members write the standards through task groups and ballots at subcommittee and main committee level.

For aviation fuel, D1655 covers conventional jet, D7566 covers blends containing synthetic components, and D4054 sets out how a new fuel gets qualified. Material requirements climb from about 10 gallons at Tier 1 to as much as 225,000 gallons for engine testing; the D4054 fast-track annex cuts that for candidates that screen well. Once blended, the fuel must meet D1655.

ASTM's laboratory services arm runs proficiency testing, including a SAF synthetic blending component programme with 61 participating labs, alongside training and reference materials. McCullough flagged the D02 committee week in Orlando from 6 to 10 December 2026, and ASTM's aviation fuels seminar in Tokyo for the Asian aviation community.

Panel: building bankable future fuel markets for North America and beyond

A few weeks ago London left one question open: who actually buys? So it was put to Matthew Viergutz (CEO, Velocys), Paula Wagner (Head of SAF Sales, Americas, Neste), Elizabeth Rolfes (Sustainability Analyst, American Express Global Business Travel), Lane Howard (Director, Biofuels, National Corn Growers Association) and Alison Graab (Executive Director, The SAF Coalition).

With jet fuel recently pushed past $200 a barrel, the panel agreed energy security now sits alongside emissions as a reason to buy SAF, together with regional jobs and domestic feedstock. Every gallon of SAF blended is a gallon of conventional jet an airline doesn't have to source. Panellists reported US SAF production up 159% from 2024 to 2025, and running 60% ahead year on year by mid-2026.

Cost remains the obstacle. Graab walked through the US value stack: RINs, state LCFS credits, 45Z at up to $1 a gallon, and a growing list of state SAF tax credits including Colorado, Kentucky and Massachusetts. Panellists argued the RFS doesn't reward SAF on its own merits, so renewable diesel often wins the producer's barrel, and saw aggressive federal mandates as unlikely in the near term. Rolfes described how corporate buyers share the premium with airlines, and noted that SBTi now allows SAF claims for business travel even when travellers aren't on the aircraft receiving the fuel.

Viergutz raised the competitive threat directly: a Chinese project with roughly a third of the capital cost of a comparable UK project, and production costs he estimated at $2,500 a tonne or less. Scale alone won't close that gap; cheaper syngas generation and upstream processing have to. Howard pointed to US ethanol exports of about 2 billion gallons from 17 to 18 billion produced, and argued that US crop feedstocks deserve greater recognition in global markets.

What Houston adds to Singapore

Strip away the individual pitches and Houston delivered one message from several directions. Feedstock is the binding constraint: HEFA runs short, so FT, ATJ, methanol and biogas all compete for the next tranche of supply. Compliance decides revenue before the plant does. Standards set the clock. Small, repeatable units are getting financed where large single bets are stalling. And buyers will pay for energy security and performance, on top of being low-carbon..

Little of that is specific to North America, these challenges apply globally. Methanol already bunkers in both Houston and Singapore. Book-and-claim and green corridors need routes between them. And Asian producers are now the cost benchmark Western projects measure themselves against.

International Future Fuels Week runs 14 to 17 June 2027 at Sands Expo and Convention Centre, Marina Bay Sands, Singapore. Details at iffw.sg.