Biodiesel stays in forefront of soybean industry

When it comes to value-added solutions, soybean farmers have a powerful product with biodiesel.

Biodiesel is a renewable, cleaner-burning diesel substitute that can be made from many types of organic vegetable oils, including used cooking grease, but soybean oil is the dominant and often preferred feedstock—thanks to a lot of hard work by far-sighted soybean advocates going back to the 1990s.

On March 18, soybean advocates recognized National Biodiesel Day and in Kansas, the Sunflower State is at the forefront. Kansas is the No. 10 state in soybean production. In 2025, soybean farmers produced 196.4 million bushels as they averaged 48.5 bushels per acre. Farmers harvested 4.05 million acres.

Kaleb Little, Kansas Soybean Association CEO and Kansas Soybean Commission administrator, said building domestic demand and markets is important to growers and biodiesel provides a significant opportunity for growth with commercial-size renewable diesel and biodiesel.

“If you look at total production and total demand for soybean oil through those fuels and it has about 10% of the value in every bushel of soybeans in the U.S. and for Kansas producers that was almost $150 million in 2024,” he said.

Bob Haselwood, Berryton, a soybean and corn producer, continues to champion biofuels and renewable energies. He is the Kansas Soybean Commission representative for Clean Fuels Alliance America. He recently traveled to California, where much higher prices for gasoline and diesel call for a solution.

Biodiesel and biofuels are economical fuel options for combustion engines. Haselwood said that at one time 75% of California’s diesel pool depended on renewable sources, including biodiesel. Today that is about 60%, mainly because of a proponent who is pushing electric vehicles, but during the trip he learned there are people who have a more pragmatic long-term approach to fuel.

Even with what a diverse agenda has meant, combustion engines are here to stay, and biofuels and renewables do help with emissions, he said.

Many major corporations are looking for ways to have a better carbon intensity score so they can have a greener footprint, Haselwood said. In Topeka, there are several companies with vehicles that were first by compressed natural gas, but renewables and biodiesel are an attractive alternative.

Because you can use biofuel in blends up to 20% in any diesel engine without modification, technology is available so that motors can use traditional diesel to start or restart the vehicle and then it switches over to 100% biodiesel.

Customers want companies to be good environmental stewards and seek green solutions, he said.

“I think there’s going to be more growth, it’s just a matter of when it will go long term,” he said.

For the industry to continue to grow it will continue to need public and private partnerships and that requires patience, he said, and that means federal and state agencies and elected officials need to be on the same page.

Kansas is in a good location with two commercial scale plants, Little said. Cargill has a biodiesel plant and crushed soybean facility in Wichita and Seaboard Energy has a renewable diesel plant in Hugoton. Also, Kansas growers have also benefited from Missouri plants in Kansas City and St. Joseph and a Seaboard Energy processing plant in Guymon, Oklahoma.

Little said there has been discussions about developing a sustainable aviation fuel plant to go with its soybean crush facility in Cherryvale, which is in southeast Kansas. Scoular also operates a crush plant in Goodland.

“We have two new soybean processing facilities come online just in the past couple of years and we basically doubled our state’s crush capacity from where it was,” Little said, adding to the biodiesel capacity and building demand and led to crush expansion. “It really is another way of getting value back to the farmer. It’ not just the end-product, it’s also about bringing that processing closer to the farmgate.”

According to the Kansas Soybean Association, a suite of facts help to tout the story. Here are some of the nuggets:

• Nationally, biodiesel demand contributes about 10% of the price of a bushel of soybeans.
• In Kansas, the biomass-based diesel industry produced $149 million for farmers in 2024.
• Nearly 50% of the soybean oil produced in the U.S. becomes biofuel.
• Kansas produces 60 million gallons of biodiesel each year.
• Kansas is home to both biodiesel and renewable diesel facilities, which together annually generate more than $1 billion in economic impact for the state.

Demand for biofuels resulted in the opening of two new soybean processing plants in 2024.

Biodiesel is the product of grassroots work. Little said it was an long-term project under the direction of the Soybean Checkoff. In the early 1990s when the national checkoff was approved by farmer advocates, they knew that developing a biodiesel industry was an important goal. When the checkoff started, there was no commercial biodiesel production in the country.

“Checkoff organizations across the Midwest invested in research to basically prove you could use it as a fuel for diesel engines and that we can actually make it out of soybean oil,” Little said. “The investment by soybean farmers is what created the industry.”

Dave Bergmeier can be reached at 620-227-1822 or dbergmeier@hpj,com.