Opinion: Is sustainable aviation fuel plan an example of public-private-nonprofit greenwashing?

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The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency recently introduced its sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) program to the public while standing in an experimental agricultural research field at the University of Minnesota with representatives of the Forever Green Initiative (FGI) and Friends of the Mississippi River.

Why? To highlight the U’s research on SAF bio-feedstocks, soybeans and canola? No. To highlight winter camelina, the Cargill-endorsed novel winter oilseed being developed and commercialized by the University of Minnesota-housed FGI.

Don’t get me wrong. I like the FGI. I like the crops it’s developing as potentially more “sustainable” crops. But I also like a balanced and open public discussion on the costs and benefits. This hasn’t been the case with the marketing and promotion of FGI crops.

Currently, winter camelina’s production costs to farmers require a market price more than double existing commodity feedstocks — for example, soybeans and canola.

So why did the MPCA government pick this crop, winter camelina, to highlight at its well-orchestrated Earth Day launch?

Climate benefits? All the proposed crop feedstocks “offset” the impacts of fossil fuels currently used to make aviation fuel.

Water quality? Winter camelina does improve water quality by reducing the amount of ground left bare on farm fields in the winter; however, planting and growing an unharvested winter cover crop with a canola or soybeans rotation would provide the same water quality benefits — and at less cost compared with winter camelina.

Maybe it’s because winter camelina is a big economic win for farmers and local communities? Again, winter camelina’s economic benefits to farmers — in terms of just breaking even — is highly dependent on government subsidies, especially to scale. Grown annually as a monocrop, winter camelina requires a $50 per hundredweight (abbreviated as cwt) market price. If grown annually with soybeans, it requires a $26 per cwt market price — just for farmers to break even. See analysis from a Food and Energy Security journal article at tinyurl.com/camelina-price.

The recent market price for soybeans has been around $16 per cwt and for canola $18 per cwt.

So who is paying the 40%-plus premium for winter camelina?

Its drag on soybean yields isn’t going to go away in the next five years. It’s not going to be cost-competitive with soy and canola without new environmental regulations or large public subsidies.

Which one do you think the MPCA and Cargill are promoting?

And even still, who thinks soybeans and canola are going to dominate Cargill and other SAF suppliers’ oilseed offerings to the emerging industry?

So again: Why is the MPCA highlighting winter camelina and not soybeans?

Winter camelina serves as the sustainability MacGuffin. The term refers to a plot device in a story that drives the action forward but proves ultimately unimportant itself.

In this case it’s a not-commercially-ready novel winter oilseed crop whose production emits more greenhouse gas emissions than it sequesters, whose water quality and biodiversity benefits are no better than existing cover crops, and which requires a significant price premium of two to five times more or public subsidies to offset its higher production costs to farmers than existing cover crops. And most underreported are the MacGuffin’s dramatic negative impacts on the summer crop yields — up to 30% for soybeans (the likely main market feedstock for manufacturing SAF), which could lead to indirect land-use change to make up for loss of soybean use caused by increased production of winter camelina. Also worth noting is that all the crops being promoted as SAF feedstocks will have a similar greenhouse gas benefit from offsetting current fossil fuels used by planes.

Yes, the photos at the event were well-timed, on Earth Day no less, and the massive communications effort to introduce the MPCA and the Walz administration’s commitment to promoting sustainable aviation fuels as a climate-smart solution for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions was set behind the backdrop of the University of Minnesota College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences, with nongovernmental organizations like Friends of the Mississippi River in tow. Where was private industry? Like Cargill? Somewhere lurking in the background, perhaps? I know from experience they are never far from the MPCA commissioner’s ear.

Why is the MPCA taking about this crop now? Because it helps “greenwash” the actual crops used to make most SAF.

Instead be talking about soybeans, corn, canola and other existing crops. These will comprise most of the SAF market in the foreseeable future.

Derric Pennington is a conservation scientist and independent editorial cartoonist with the goal of holding powerful people and institutions accountable. He is currently CEO and founder of the forthcoming nonprofit Grounding Platitudes and affiliated with the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota. He was formerly an economic policy analyst at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.