Flint Hills Resources’ Pine Bend Refinery is Minnesota’s biggest petroleum refinery and single largest human-made source of greenhouse gas emissions.

The sprawling Rosemount complex is also the primary supplier of jet fuel to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. In July, it’ll take an important step to reduce that product’s impact – and to clean up its operations overall – when it commissions what it says will be the United States’ biggest sustainable aviation fuel blending facility outside California.

The new unit will mix biofuel derived from crops, animal byproducts and even used cooking oil with jet fuel distilled from petroleum. Federal regulations allow blends containing up to 50% sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF. The blending facility won’t replace half MSP’s oil-derived jet fuel overnight, though. It won’t even come close, mostly because there’s not enough U.S.-made SAF on the market yet.

A broad group of Minnesota companies, nonprofits and state agencies want to change that. They say Minnesota is uniquely positioned to become not just a national but a global hub for SAF production within the next 15 years or so – and they have a strong case.

“We have as many assets as any other place in America to give it a try,” said Peter Frosch, CEO of Greater MSP, the regional economic development partnership leading the state’s SAF effort with support from companies like Delta Air Lines, Ecolab and Bank of America. “We want to be known around the world as a place that is willing to take on and effectively solve hard challenges.”

A ‘hard challenge’ indeed

Greater MSP is taking on this challenge because most experts see SAF as the only real hope of slashing the aviation industry’s environmental impact anytime soon. 

Right now, aviation accounts for about 11% of transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. and 3% of overall U.S. emissions. SAF is a “drop-in” fuel that can power today’s aircraft engines. Other low- or zero-emissions liquid fuels, like pure hydrogen or methanol, would require new engines and possibly entirely new aircraft designs. Same deal for batteries, which may also simply be too heavy for long-haul air travel. 

“We are very early in figuring out how we get to net zero for aviation,” said Anjali Bains, managing director for transportation with Fresh Energy, a St. Paul-based environmental nonprofit.

SAF will be hard enough. Delta Air Lines, a key instigator of Minnesota’s SAF effort, recently downgraded its 2050 net-zero target to “aspirational” status. It says it still intends to reach 10% SAF usage by 2030. But the U.S. has few SAF producers today. MSP’s first batches will travel nearly 1,000 miles from Montana Renewables’ Great Falls plant.

At the molecular level, the sustainable aviation fuel produced by Montana Renewables and its competitors is nearly identical to traditional jet fuel, a refined blend of mostly kerosene. Like regular jet fuel, it emits carbon and other pollutants when burned, but it’s considered “sustainable” because its carbon content comes from renewable sources – often material that would itself be burned or simply left to rot – rather than fossil fuels buried millions of years ago.

Related: Corn-powered planes? Why Delta — and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz — lobbied for new biofuel tax credit

Like most producers today, Montana Renewables makes its SAF from animal fat, known as tallow, and plant-based oils. This is known as the “HEFA” pathway, and it’s one of several viable ways to make SAF. 

The other big ones are alcohol-to-jet, or AtJ, and power-to-liquids, or PtL. AtJ turns crops or other biomass into alcohols that are further refined into energy-dense liquids. PtL uses (ideally renewable) electricity to produce concentrated hydrogen and carbon, the building blocks of jet fuel. The resultant product is known as “e-fuel,” or synthetic aviation fuel.

Each has upsides and downsides, according to an analysis prepared for the Biofuels Alliance. There’s not nearly enough waste feedstocks to meet global jet fuel demand through HEFA alone, for example, and sourcing enough crop-based feedstock could compete with food production. AtJ can use a wide variety of biological feedstocks and piggyback off existing ethanol production infrastructure, which Minnesota has plenty of, but it’s energy-intensive and costly. 

E-fuel is also expensive, in part because it requires captured carbon dioxide, which is costly in and of itself and is not yet produced in significant quantities. But Minnesota’s abundant wind energy resource makes it a fantastic place to produce renewable hydrogen. And an escalating minimum blending requirement for e-fuels in the European Union, which Greater MSP hopes will buy a significant amount of Minnesota SAF, is a long-term tail wind.

“[E-fuel] is one of the main ways we’re going to decarbonize our aviation system to meet our climate goals,” Bains said.

Renewable without the political baggage

Unlike some green-coded industries, sustainable aviation fuel production enjoys bipartisan support from state and federal lawmakers. 

In a legislative session that saw few bills of consequence become law, the Minnesota Legislature extended a $1.50-per-gallon tax credit for synthetic and bio-based SAF until 2035 and created a bonus credit of up to $2 per gallon for SAFs that reduce carbon intensity by more than the minimum required 50% over traditional jet fuel. To qualify, the fuel must be produced or blended in Minnesota and used in flights departing from an in-state airport.

“That was huge – one of the few things that passed this session related to climate and clean energy,” Bains said. State DFLers supported the bill’s environmental and land-use protections, while Republicans believed a generous tax credit would give Minnesota an edge over Illinois and other SAF-supportive Midwestern states, she added.

Minnesota’s tax credit comes at an opportune time for producers like Montana Renewables after Washington Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut the federal SAF tax credit from $1.75 to $1 per gallon. In October, Clean Air Task Force analysts Rachel Starr and Jonathan Lewis warned that the change could have a chilling effect on U.S. SAF investment.

Related: Corn’s clean-energy promise is clashing with its climate footprint

“Many SAF producers factored the $1.75/gallon credit value into their business models and are now facing serious risks to investment and production capacity with the newly lowered credit value … it is not clear how much of the planned expansion will proceed, as project developers around the country reckon with these changes,” they wrote.

The uncertainty extends to Minnesota. 

In 2024, DG Fuels said it would build a $5 billion SAF facility in Moorhead that could produce 193 million gallons of fuel annually, or about six times more than Montana Renewables’ Great Falls plant. Clean Energy Economy Minnesota, a trade group, said earlier this year that DG Fuels remains “on track” to open in 2030. But Frank Kohlasch, deputy commissioner for air and climate with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, said in a June interview that DG Fuels hasn’t yet applied for the permits it needs from his department. (DG Fuels did not respond to a MinnPost request for comment.)

No matter what happens with any particular sustainable aviation fuel production proposal, Kohlasch said Minnesota is “very well situated” to become a hub for the nascent industry thanks to its diverse agriculture, forestry and shipping assets.

“Whether it’s a producer that wants to use wood waste in the northern part of the state, or a living cover crop, or seed oils … we see that we have broad opportunities for multiple feedstocks to be able to make SAF,” he said. “And we have the Duluth-Superior port, which gives us access to the Atlantic [Ocean] and the European markets.”

Doing sustainable aviation fuel the right way

The people working to build a SAF economy in Minnesota say the work – if successful – could be transformative for cyclical industries like agriculture. They warn, however, that SAF isn’t inherently sustainable just because it’s not made from fossil fuels.

In 2024, Fresh Energy, The Nature Conservancy and Friends of the Mississippi River warned that irresponsible SAF production could increase conversion of natural ecosystems to cropland and exacerbate the region’s already-serious water quality issues. The groups laid out 10 “guiding principles” to mitigate these risks, like minimizing land conversion; prioritizing scalable production pathways; and expanding the definition of “sustainable” to include air, water, biodiversity, and clean energy.

Bains said this session’s SAF bill reflected some of those principles, but others will take years of work to realize. With help from an MPCA grant, University of Minnesota researchers are working to commercialize one such pathway: winter-hardy “cash cover crops,” like camelina, whose oil-rich seeds can supply the raw material for SAF. These tough little plants overwinter on active agricultural fields, absorbing excess soil nitrogen that would otherwise end up in local waterways. They’re harvested in spring without impacting the food crops they share space with.

Andrea Vaubel, deputy commissioner for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, said farmers are excited for the “new market opportunities” a robust SAF industry will create – including less-familiar crops like camelina.

“Farmers will grow what there’s a market for … so if we can build out the SAF market, that’s where it’ll go,” she said.

Continuous living cover crops grow on only about 2% of Minnesota cropland, where they’re primarily used to improve soil health, according to a 2025 paper by a group of University of Minnesota graduate students. A growing SAF industry could significantly expand their use, they said. 

Camelina is already viable on the 2.2 million or so “small grains” acres where they’re currently viable, and ongoing development work at the U of M could make it viable within 10 years or so on the corn and soybean fields that occupy more than half the state’s cultivated land, according to a 2023 report from Ecotone Analytics. Ecotone found that even in a “modest adoption” scenario, the SAF industry could spur planting of camelina and other oilseeds on 5.5 million Minnesota acres by 2050. 

Trevor Russell, water program director with Friends of the Mississippi River, said scaled-up production of winter-hardy oilseeds would support a future SAF industry that meets his organization’s expansive definition of “sustainable.” 

Related: A rebuke of science and the promise of sustainable aviation fuel

“We are much more excited about winter-hardy oilseeds than anything else because it’s something that would get us a long way toward our water quality goals,” Russell said. 

Those goals will remain out of reach if “summer annuals” like corn and soybeans remain the only crops grown on huge swathes of Minnesota farmland, Russell said. His group sees “the early and teenage years” of a growing SAF industry as an opportunity to accelerate more soil- and water-friendly farming practices ahead of an eventual (possible) turn toward e-fuels that don’t require biomass. 

The alternative – a robust SAF industry without widespread cover crop cultivation – is bleak, he said.

“If dominated by the least sustainable strategies, we could see this being a net detriment to our resources at large. You get a scenario where you reduce aviation emissions, but it wouldn’t be worth it,” Russell said.

Greater MSP appears to agree. “Land use and water quality are priorities baked into the design of how we’re working to meet the global SAF challenge,” its Minnesota SAF Hub website says. “Regenerative agriculture is central to our multi-horizon strategy.”

At the moment, Greater MSP is focused on enabling in-state SAF production sooner than later – the second of three “horizons” it has laid out on the path to a full-fledged SAF industry. The partnership is “optimistic” that a producer would announce plans to set up a facility in Minnesota in 2026 “as the next of what will be many announcements,” Frosch said.

But it’s also not picking winners yet. The third “horizon,” targeted for 2035 and beyond, aims for Minnesota to produce upward of 100 million gallons annually using a range of low carbon-intensity pathways, like ethanol plants running carbon capture equipment and power-to-liquids processes using renewable energy. With some infrastructure upgrades to boost export capacity, Frosch said the Port of Duluth-Superior could eventually send substantial amounts of Minnesota-made SAF to ports in the United Kingdom and continental Europe.

In the meantime, Greater MSP hopes to build early momentum by turning existing crop and food byproducts into airplane fuel, Frosch said. The opening of the Pine Bend blending facility this summer will be a crucial proof point for the nascent industry.

“That means we have succeeded in creating a SAF economy in Minnesota, where people can fly out of MSP with SAF on the airplane,” Frosch said. “And that will start to decarbonize the airport and make it one of the most sustainable in the world. That’s a win.”

Editor’s note: This story is the third in a four-part series on clean energy innovations within Minnesota’s industrial sector. The series is underwritten by Fresh Energy, which like all MinnPost funders does not weigh in on editorial decisions.

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