Posts by Hoekstra Trading LLC
Midwest States Pose New Challenges for Gasoline Supply
With summer gasoline season upon us, refiners and gasoline distributors are now supplying the more expensive, low volatility summer gasoline grades that cause pump prices to increase in summer. This year, they include a new low volatility grade that is being supplied for the first time to motorists in several Midwest states. This is the…
Read MoreMy Top Three Takeaways From the Bloomberg Farm, Food, and Fuel Summit 2025
Number 3 — Confusion reigns At a conference in September, 2024, a panelist said, “Biofuels is a difficult place to work” At the time, that struck me as a concise understatement about the biofuels business environment. The same feeling was in the air at two other conferences in January covering California’s biofuels regulations, and again…
Read MoreComparing Theoretical and Market Renewable Identification Number (RIN) Prices Part 2 – How Well Do RIN Market Prices Track With Economic Theory?
Read other blogs in this series – Comparing Theoretical and Market RIN Prices: How well do RIN Market Prices Track With Economic Theory? That question is best answered by the 2 charts below. Figure 1 (whose title says Fig. 2) shows a copy of Figure 2 extracted from the published Irwin-McCormack-Stock (IMS) article that defines…
Read MoreComparing Theoretical and Market Renewable Identification Number (RIN) Prices – 3 Factors
Why are Hoekstra Trading’s theoretical RIN prices (D4T and D3T) different from the D4 and D3 RIN market prices? We ask ourselves that question every week. The calculation of D4T and D3T involves assumptions that often don’t apply in real life. We propose many possible reasons why the theoretical and market prices could be different. …
Read MoreD3 Renewable Identification Number (RIN) Price Collapse
See previous blogs in this series: The gold data in Figure 1 shows how the D3 RIN market price collapsed by $1.32, from a high of $3.40 the week of September 27, 2024 (red arrow), to a low of $2.08 on December 5 (blue arrow). December 5 was the date of release of EPA’s proposal…
Read MoreWhat’s Next for Cellulosic Biofuel and the D3 RIN? – Part 8, A New Industry Emerges
See previous blogs in this series: Cellulosic biomass consists of non-food crops and waste biomass like corn stalks, corncobs, straw, wood, wood byproducts methane emitted from landfills and animal manure. In 2007, the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) set mandates for generating transportation fuels from these raw materials and other categories of biomass. The vision was…
Read MoreWhat’s Next for Cellulosic Biofuels and the D3 RIN Part 6 – D3 RIN Price – Is The Market Off By a Factor of Ten?
See previous posts in this series, What’s Next For Cellulosic Biofuels and the D3 RIN?: Familiar corporate names like Waste Management, Cummins, Freightliner and BP have joined forces with dozens of less familiar public companies and startups to form a new American industry. Thousands of commercial trucks, powered by natural gas fueled engines, are on…
Read MoreLove Letters Part 1 – Big Oil Gets Tough Love From Investor Elliott Management
See other blogs in this series: Love Letters Part 2 -Rewind to Aug 27, 2021 – What’s the Missing Piece in Phillips 66 (PSX) Refining Profit Problem? Elliott Management, a private investment firm owning a $2.5 billion stake in Phillips 66 (PSX) stock, published a critique of PSX’s structure, performance, and management in the form…
Read MoreTop 3 Takeaways – OPIS LCFS and Carbon Markets Workshop San Diego
This week’s OPIS Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) and Carbon Markets Workshop in San Diego was my first immersion in the capital of low carbon fuels regulation, California. As expected, the program was rich in content, highlighted by professionally-moderated panel discussions with experts on every topic I’d hoped to learn about, and I learned a…
Read MoreD4 RIN Price – What’s the Outlook for 2025?
September and October brought bullish predictions for the D4 Renewable Identification Number (RIN). So far they have not played out. What’s the outlook for 2025? Bullish sentiment was in the air this autumn, when D4 RIN market prices rose into the high 70’s from a February low of 39 cents (much like happened with Chicago…
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