Top biofuel statistics

• The US produced 16,514.8 million gallons of fuel ethanol in 2025, which was 80.1% of its combined ethanol and biomass-based diesel output.
• Biomass-based diesel, meaning biodiesel plus renewable diesel, fell 15.8% in 2025 to 4,097.1 million gallons after a record 4,865.7 million in 2024.
• The Alternative Fuels Data Center lists 4,784 E85 station locations as of October 29, 2026.
• Soybean oil supplied 33.3% of the fats and oils that plants making the two diesel fuels used in 2025.
• US ethanol exports ran at 1.96 billion gallons through November 2025, on pace for a record year, the Renewable Fuels Association reports.
• The International Energy Agency expects Brazil to supply 40% of the growth in road-transport biofuel demand to 2030.
• Corn ethanol’s emissions run from about 39% below gasoline in a 2019 USDA analysis to likely at least 24% above it in a 2022 study.
• Darling Ingredients reports that its Diamond Green Diesel joint venture sold 348.8 million gallons of renewable fuels in the second quarter of 2026.

What is a biofuel, and is it renewable?

Biofuels are, in EIA’s wording, liquid fuels and blending components made from biomass, the organic material that comes from plants and animals. In the US that mostly means ethanol, which is made from corn starch in 94% of cases, plus biodiesel and renewable diesel made from fats and oils.

Is a biofuel renewable? EIA calls biomass renewable organic material, and it supplied about 5% of US primary energy in 2025. Biofuels were 53% of the biomass energy the US used that year, the largest slice of the wider biomass energy picture.

Whether a crop-based fuel counts as renewable in practice depends on regrowth keeping pace with harvest, which the page on biomass as a renewable resource works through. Renewable and low-carbon are separate questions, and the lifecycle estimates for corn ethanol further down span a wide range.

How much biofuel does the US make?

US ethanol production rose from 13,929.1 million gallons in 2011 to 16,514.8 million in 2025. Over the same years, renewable diesel grew from 62.0 million gallons to 2,946.2 million.

Source: EIA Monthly Energy Review Table 10.3, Table 10.4a and Table 10.4b, September 2026 edition, calendar years. The 2025 figures are preliminary.

Renewable diesel did the climbing, and the last row of the table shows both diesel fuels falling. Biodiesel dropped 31.1% to 1,150.9 million gallons. Renewable diesel’s fall was smaller, 7.8% to 2,946.2 million.

Through the first six months of 2026, plants made 8,314.6 million gallons of ethanol and 2,286.2 million gallons of biodiesel and renewable diesel combined. Those are half-year totals, so they don’t compare with the full years in the table. On the company side, Darling Ingredients reports that its Diamond Green Diesel joint venture sold 348.8 million gallons of renewable fuels in the second quarter of 2026.

EIA’s October 2026 outlook forecasts ethanol at 1.10 million barrels a day in 2026, up from 1.08 million in 2025. It has renewable diesel at 0.23 million barrels per day in 2026, up from 0.19 million.

The combined total, the ethanol share and the fall in biomass-based diesel are computed from EIA’s three fuel tables, so they cover those fuels and leave out EIA’s separate category for other biofuels. EIA revises annual figures as new months arrive, so the 2025 numbers can move.

How each fuel gets made

Ethanol is grain alcohol. Producers use yeast to ferment the starch or sugar in corn or sugarcane, distill the result up to fuel grade and add a denaturant so it can’t be sold as a beverage, as EIA explains. It’s the same basic biology as a distillery, aimed at your gas tank instead of a bottle.

Biodiesel takes a different chemical path, called transesterification. A producer mixes roughly 100 pounds of oil with 10 pounds of methanol and a catalyst such as sodium or potassium hydroxide. The reaction yields 100 pounds of biodiesel and 10 pounds of glycerin, according to the Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center.

That glycerin isn’t waste. It’s sold into pharmaceutical and cosmetics manufacturing.

Renewable diesel skips transesterification. Refiners run the same fats and oils through hydrotreating, adding hydrogen under heat and pressure to strip out oxygen and produce what the industry calls hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids, or HEFA. The output is a hydrocarbon chain almost indistinguishable from petroleum diesel, so it meets ASTM D975, the petroleum diesel spec, instead of the separate ASTM D6751 standard written for biodiesel.

What feeds the vats and reactors

Corn is the main US ethanol feedstock, and ethanol and its by-products took 5,547 million bushels of it in the 2025/26 marketing year, about 33.7% of all US corn use by a share computed from USDA’s table. The figure includes by-products, so it overstates the corn that becomes fuel itself. USDA’s Economic Research Service projected in July 2026 that 5.55 billion bushels would be the second-largest amount on record.

The two diesel fuels draw on a wider menu of fats and oils. Soybean oil supplied 11,016 million pounds in 2025, or 33.3% of the total, down from 13,320 million pounds in 2024.

Source: EIA, Feedstocks Consumed for Production of Biofuels, release of September 30, 2026, calendar years. Shares are computed from EIA’s totals.

Tallow passed yellow grease in 2025, with 9,025 million pounds against 5,166 million. EIA’s table reports yellow grease and has no separate used cooking oil line.

USDA counts soybean oil on a different calendar. Its October 2026 WASDE has 14,800 million pounds going to biofuel in the 2025/26 marketing year, about 49% of domestic soybean oil use, on a year that runs October to September. USDA also expects the oil to average 64.08 cents a pound over the marketing year ending in September 2026, against 47.59 cents the year before.

Which countries make the most biofuel?

The US made 16,494 million gallons of fuel ethanol in 2025, 52% of a world total of 32,000 million, by the Renewable Fuels Association’s count.

Source: Renewable Fuels Association, Annual World Fuel Ethanol Production. RFA’s US figure differs from EIA’s.

Brazil, whose ethanol comes mostly from sugar cane, made less in 2025 than in 2024, while India’s output rose 41% to 2,600 million gallons. The IEA expects the US to remain the largest biofuel producer and consumer through 2030.

The two US counts differ slightly. EIA has 16,514.8 million gallons for 2025, which is 21 million more than RFA’s count. Neither source says why.

Gallons made and gallons burned at home differ too. US consumption was 14,340.7 million gallons in 2025, about 2,174 million below production. RFA reports exports on pace to pass 2 billion gallons that year.

How much of each you can put in a tank

Ethanol made 10.5% of US gasoline in 2025, and EIA’s June 2026 outlook expects 10.7% in 2026. The blend wall is the point at which fuel infrastructure and all vehicle engines would need updating to take more than E10.

Source: EIA, Ethanol and the blend wall, AFDC, Biodiesel blends and AFDC, Renewable diesel.

E15 is approved for model year 2001 and newer light-duty vehicles, so if your car is that age or newer, you can likely use it. E85 goes further, at 51% to 83% ethanol, but it needs a flex-fuel vehicle. AFDC lists 4,784 E85 station locations, 1,997 for biodiesel and 1,237 for renewable diesel as of October 29, 2026.

EPA issued the first nationwide fuel waiver for the 2026 summer on March 25, 2026, which let E15 be sold from June 1 to September 15. The House passed year-round E15 legislation on May 13, 2026, by 218 votes. The bill went to the Senate.

The most common biodiesel blends are B5 and B20, and many diesel engine makers approve B20, so check your warranty before you fill a diesel pickup with it. At the other end, renewable diesel faces no such ceiling, because AFDC says it can fully replace petroleum diesel or be blended in any amount.

The federal program that created this market

EPA finalized the 2026 and 2027 Renewable Fuel Standard volumes on March 27, 2026, setting total renewable fuel at 26.81 billion Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) for 2026 and 27.02 billion for 2027. Refiners and importers are the program’s obligated parties. They must retire enough RINs to meet an annual quota, and one RIN stands for one ethanol-equivalent gallon.

Source: EPA, Final Renewable Fuel Standards for 2026 and 2027. Reallocated volume is EPA’s 70 percent reallocation of small refinery exemptions granted for 2023 through 2025.

EPA set 2026 biomass-based diesel at 9.07 billion RINs and cellulosic biofuel at 1.36 billion, after partially waiving the 2025 cellulosic requirement for a production shortfall.

RINs aren’t gallons. A gallon of biodiesel generates 1.5 RINs and a gallon of ethanol generates 1.0. As of June 4, 2026, D4 RINs traded at $2.41 and D6 RINs at $2.37, both close to their all-time highs set in 2021.

California’s carbon math, and the credit that replaced it

California runs its own carbon pricing system on top of the federal one. Its Low Carbon Fuel Standard, or LCFS, tallies credits and deficits by the carbon intensity of each transportation fuel.

In the first quarter of 2026, CARB counted 6.93 million metric tons of credits against 9.77 million metric tons of deficits. The cumulative bank stood at 36.86 million metric tons, and regulated entities can still correct the quarterly figures.

A newer federal tax credit reshaped the incentive further. The Clean Fuel Production Credit, known as 45Z, replaced older, separate blender credits for biodiesel and sustainable aviation fuel with one production credit for fuel made starting January 1, 2025, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. It pays 20 cents a gallon at the base rate, and the law limits qualifying feedstock to North America.

The 2025 reconciliation law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, extended 45Z through 2029 and dropped indirect land-use-change emissions (ILUC) from the carbon scores, which lowers scores for corn ethanol and soy biodiesel by up to 20 to 25 grams of CO2-equivalent per megajoule, per the Clean Air Task Force.

Treasury proposed 45Z regulations on February 4, 2026, and IRS Notice 2026-53 on September 8, 2026 set the 2026 emissions rate table. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the credit will cost $25.7 billion through 2029, the Clean Air Task Force reports, against an original estimate near $2.9 billion.

Sustainable aviation fuel is next

Sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, is jet fuel that can be made through HEFA, the same hydrotreating process renewable diesel uses. EIA estimated US capacity at about 30,000 barrels a day in May 2025, counting only HEFA SAF.

Even at that pace, EIA expected SAF to stay under 2% of the 1.7 million barrels a day of US jet fuel in 2025 and near 2% in 2026. Your seat on a US flight is still burning almost entirely petroleum jet fuel.

Capacity built unevenly. Phillips 66 finished its 10,000-barrel-a-day Rodeo project in California in the third quarter of 2024 and then temporarily halted production in the fourth, while Diamond Green Diesel completed a 15,000-barrel-a-day unit at Port Arthur, Texas, in the fourth quarter of 2024.

The 2025 law cut the SAF credit from $1.75 a gallon to the same $1 cap that applies to other biofuels. EIA’s October 2026 outlook puts other biofuels, the category that holds SAF, at 0.04 million barrels per day in both 2025 and 2026.

Is biofuel better for the climate than gasoline?

Estimates of corn ethanol’s emissions against gasoline run from clearly better to likely worse, depending on what each study counts.

Source: EPA, Overview of the Renewable Fuel Standard. USDA, corn ethanol greenhouse gas analysis. Argonne National Laboratory, GREET model results. Lark and colleagues, PNAS.

The USDA and Argonne rows model the average life cycle of a gallon of ethanol, and Argonne presented its figure at an industry conference. The PNAS paper estimates what the policy changed on the ground instead. It found the RFS raised corn prices by 30% and added 2.1 million hectares of cropland between 2008 and 2016, and the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center summarizes its conclusion that corn ethanol failed to meet the policy’s own greenhouse gas emissions targets.

EPA’s third triennial report to Congress found that the RFS had a modest positive effect on biofuel production and so a modest negative effect on the environment. Both diesel fuels face a tougher test than corn ethanol, because the RFS requires a 50% lifecycle cut from them.

Your grocery bill and your gas tank pull from the same soybean field

Soybean oil goes into both tanks and kitchens, and USDA’s October 2026 WASDE puts the biofuel share of domestic use near half. The American Soybean Association put the 2024 record for US biomass-based diesel production at 4.86 billion gallons. It calculates actual 2026 use at 5.86 billion gallons once backfill and exemptions are counted, with 5.66 billion gallons from US plants.

The 5.86 billion is use, not production, and the analysis predates EPA’s final rule.

Whether farmland pushed into fuel crops adds carbon is the same accounting debate that surrounds whether biomass is carbon neutral. The clean fuel credit described above leaves indirect land-use change out of its scoring.

At the grocery store, USDA’s Economic Research Service forecasts food-at-home prices up 2.3% in 2026 in its October 23, 2026 update, with prices for fats and oils below 2025’s. At the pump, the blend table above lists which vehicles can take each fuel, and your owner’s manual settles the rest.

Burn sawdust that would otherwise rot in a landfill, and the carbon neutral label holds up close to true. Burn whole trees cut specifically for pellets, and the payback can take decades, or it never happens at all.

The carbon debt problem

Picture a woodstove. Cut a log, and the carbon locked inside it while it grew goes up the chimney in the few minutes it takes to burn. A sapling planted in the same clearing needs decades to pull that same carbon back out of the air. Producers call the process carbon neutral because the harvested forest is expected to regrow and reabsorb what burned.

Chatham House found that assumption holds in many scenarios, but in some, harvesting permanently cuts the forest’s capacity to absorb carbon, making the payback period infinite. The gap between the two outcomes is why “carbon neutral” needs a feedstock and a timeframe attached before it means anything.

Source: Chatham House, 2017

The same Chatham House analysis cites a UK government-commissioned model, known as BEaC, which ran 29 biomass scenarios and found 11 with higher net emissions than natural gas, five of those worse than coal. If your power supplier burns wood pellets to meet a renewable target, that plant could be one of the 11 higher-emitting scenarios in the government’s own BEaC model. Climate targets have deadlines, and a biomass plant that reaches carbon parity decades from now doesn’t help meet a target due in the 2030s.

The feedstock decides almost everything

Lumping a sawdust briquette in with a centuries-old log flattens a real distinction, and the industry’s defenders have a point about that much. Low-impact feedstock covers sawmill residues and forest slash that would decompose or get burned as waste regardless.

Using that material for energy displaces a fossil fuel. The carbon in it was heading back into the atmosphere either way, whether it decomposed on the forest floor or went up a stack. Black liquor, a byproduct of wood pulping, made up 28% of US biomass electricity generation as of 2018, and that’s rarely treated as a forestry problem. If you live in a mill town, the boiler burning that black liquor runs on the pulping process’s own waste, no new logging required.

High-impact feedstock is roundwood harvested specifically for a pellet mill, and whole trees from natural or old growth stands. Hardwoods regrow slower than softwood plantations, which stretches the payback further, and Chatham House found that mature trees pull down more carbon per year than young ones. Cutting an established forest removes an active carbon sink at the same time it releases decades of stored carbon, including soil carbon lost to the disturbance of logging.

Why the accounting rules make this confusing

Greenhouse gas accounting treats biomass differently from every other fuel. Under IPCC guidance, the carbon from burning biomass isn’t counted in the energy sector of a national inventory. National inventories assume that carbon gets captured instead in the land use sector, through the change in forest carbon stock where the tree was cut. The Greenhouse Gas Management Institute explains the logic as avoiding double counting, since biogenic emissions are assumed to reverse a recent removal from photosynthesis.

That logic works inside one country’s border. Across borders, the accounting breaks down. If a “renewable” line on your UK energy bill includes wood pellets, it can rest on a plant burning Canadian or American wood that reports zero CO2 at the stack, while the harvest is supposed to show up instead in the exporting country’s land use accounts. Whether it does, consistently, is at the center of the political fights over biomass in the past decade.

The EU and the UK tightened the rules

Regulators eventually noticed the gap. The EU’s revised Renewable Energy Directive, in force since 20 November 2023, excludes wood from primary and old growth forests, and from highly biodiverse or high-carbon-stock land such as peatland, from counting toward renewable targets or subsidies. It also applies what the directive calls a cascading use principle, meaning wood is meant to go to its highest-value use before it gets burned for fuel.

The UK went further with the deal it struck for Drax specifically. Under the government’s February 2025 decision covering the plant’s subsidy from 2027 through 2031, sustainable sourcing requirements rise from 70% to 100% of biomass. Supply chain emissions intensity has to fall from 55.6 to 36.6 grams of CO2 equivalent per megajoule over that same stretch.

Wood from primary or old growth forest is explicitly excluded from support payments under the same decision. The government expects Drax’s output to fall to about 27% of the time, down from roughly 67%, with clawback penalties for noncompliance. If you’re one of the millions of UK households whose energy bill funds this subsidy, the 100% sourcing requirement is what decides whether Drax keeps its subsidy after 2027.

Drax is the test case, and it isn’t simple

Drax, the former coal plant in North Yorkshire, is the UK’s largest renewable power station, running on four 645-megawatt biomass units, 2.58 gigawatts combined. Even though UK carbon accounting treats that combustion as carbon neutral, Drax’s stack emitted 13.3 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2024, more than the next four largest UK emitters combined, after burning 7.6 million tonnes of imported wood pellets that year.

Drax has collected more than £8.72 billion in UK subsidies since 2012, Ember calculated in April 2026. The payments hit a record £999 million in 2025 alone, up 15% on 2024, and that added about £13 to a UK power bill that year, including yours if you pay one. “Nearly £1 billion for woody biomass burning is an astonishing high-water mark for public subsidies,” said Frankie Mayo, the report’s author, in Ember’s analysis. Drax dropped out of the S&P Global Clean Energy Index in October 2021 over doubts about that carbon neutral classification.

Ofgem fined Drax £25 million in 2024 for misreporting the forestry type and sawlog share of its Canadian wood shipments. The regulator called it weak data governance and stopped short of alleging deliberate misreporting.

More than 20 environmental groups wrote to Drax shareholders opposing a roughly $625 million plan to expand pellet supply, arguing the sourcing doesn’t support a carbon neutral claim.

Stand.earth documented Drax purchasing whole logs from old growth forest in British Columbia in 2024, and likely in 2025, despite the province’s forestry minister denying it. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority investigated Drax’s wood-sourcing disclosures from August 2025 to June 2026, then closed the case with no action taken.

Drax also said in March 2026 that it would stop burning British Columbia biomass at its UK plant within a year, a move Stand.earth called a milestone. It will keep sourcing BC wood for pellets sold into Asian and European markets, so the change addresses one customer’s supply chain, not the logging practice behind it. Drax’s marketing got ahead of its sourcing, and UK and EU regulators closed the gaps only after journalists and campaigners forced the question open.

Where biomass makes sense

The whole-tree, long-payback cases aside, a narrower category holds up. Waste and residue streams are the clearest case. Agricultural residue, sawmill byproducts, food processing waste, and municipal organic waste would otherwise land in a dump and generate methane, a gas the EPA rates at least 28 times more potent than CO2 over 100 years. If a landfill near your town takes that same waste, burning it for heat instead keeps a methane source out of the air without touching a live forest.

Combined heat and power (CHP) plants improve the math further, using the same fuel for both electricity and usable heat. The EPA puts CHP efficiency above 80%, versus about 50% for separate heat and power.

Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, known as BECCS, pairs biomass burning with underground carbon capture and storage. Anyone who calls it settled is skipping past real problems. Capturing the carbon from burning biomass and storing it underground could, in theory, make a plant carbon negative, provided the biomass is low impact.

Drax’s own BECCS project at Selby paused its roughly £2 billion investment in March 2023 while waiting for a firm government subsidy commitment. The February 2025 decision on Drax’s future subsidy declined to include BECCS support, saying it “cannot form the primary basis” of near-term policy.

Ember estimated in a December 2025 analysis that a single Drax carbon removal project could cost up to £30 billion in subsidies, more than the UK’s entire carbon capture budget, calling the removals “far from guaranteed” given the timeline and unclear efficacy. Independent advisory bodies have recommended that carbon removal projects source their feedstock domestically, but Drax already imports over 99% of its feedstock.

Bioenergy overall still accounts for 8.76% of world total primary energy supply in 2022, the World Bioenergy Association counted, a meaningful share of the global mix.

The £13 question EU and UK rules are trying to answer

Ask “is biomass carbon neutral” and expect a single word back, and the answer will mislead you either way. Ask which biomass and over what timeframe, and it gets useful fast. Waste-derived biomass burned in an efficient CHP plant is about as close to low carbon as bioenergy gets. Whole trees cut from natural forest and shipped across an ocean to satisfy a renewable energy quota belong in a different category, whatever the smokestack reading says.

If you pay a UK power bill, you already fund part of the answer, whether the wood behind it paid back its carbon debt or not. Ember put the 2025 subsidy cost at about £13 per household for a plant whose stack reading of zero still rests on unverified sourcing paperwork. The EU’s cascading use rule and the sourcing terms attached to Drax’s subsidy for 2027 through 2031 are the first rules built to catch the gap between that zero and the forest it came from, and whether they hold is still an open question.