Peak Whale: Pathways to SAF, XCF Global and the Quest for Biocrude

“Thar’ she blows!”

The cry cracked across the waves like musket fire.

The decks of the Elizabeth Starbuck were slick with oil and brine, the air heavy with salt and smoke. In the dawn light off the whale-rich grounds of New Zealand, 4000 leagues sou’west of Nantucket, three boats dropped from the davits and pulled hard toward the fountain-spout of a great ash-colored sperm whale, the prize of the Pacific. It’s 1848, the peak of the whaling era.

“Drive her ’ome!” bellowed Captain Collier from the quarterdeck, one hand gripping the rail, the other signaling the boats. The men bent their backs to the oars until their knuckles whitened and the muscles stood like ropes beneath their sleeves.

The senior boatsteerer rose, feet braced wide against the thwarts. He steadied his arm, sighted the glistening flank, and loosed the harpoon. The sea erupted—white spray, red foam, the bellow of men and the thunder of the dying giant. The thrashing built to madness, then slackened to silence.

Three cheers for Captain Henry Ward Collier and the crew of the Starbuck, hunters of light in a darkening world. When the log marked a thousand barrels, there would be doughnuts fried in whale oil and fresh coffee passed along the deck. That night the try-works would roar—twin chimneys of fire against the southern sky—signals of triumph in the only fuel trade that mattered in 1848: whale oil.

But the world was running short of whalemen, not whales. The lamps of London burned brighter each year, and the price of oil climbed with the hunger of the cities. Whale oil that once sold for forty cents a gallon soon fetched more than a dollar—dear light for any household. The arithmetic was merciless: biology could not be sped, and every cask that filled the lamps of London came at the cost of months and men.

Captain Collier knew the numbers all too well. He had lost his brother Hezekiah to these same waters seventeen years before—a small boat stove in by a fluking bull, the sea red as copper for a mile. Each barrel came dearer now, every voyage longer, the crew thinner, the profit leaner. “A man can burn his life for oil only so long,” he would mutter, staring into the try-works’ fire. Yet still they hunted, because the world would not wait in the dark.

Reno, the Present Day

The lamps did not go out when the whales grew scarce. Geology filled the void, and the world burned on—crude oil in place of blubber, pipelines for harpoons. The age of light became the age of speed, and every generation since has chased a faster flame.

Now, once again, we are hunters of fuel. Only the quarry has changed.

In the high desert of Nevada, under the gleam of steel and sodium lamps, the new whalemen tend their fires. The plant is called New Rise Reno, and its captain is a man of the modern fleet—Mihir Dange of XCF Global—commanding a $350 million vessel of reactors, towers, and tanks. The scent of it is different now—hot metal, hydrogen, and catalytic vapor instead of oil and brine—but the rhythm is the same: feedstock in, fuel out, every barrel hard won.

Like Collier’s crew, they have mastered their hunt. XCF takes plant oils and waste fats, runs them through HEFA hydrotreaters, and draws forth a fuel that burns in jet engines instead of lanterns. It is clean, proven, and vital. For now, it is the best scale-ready path to decarbonize flight we have.

At present, XCF runs its hydrotreaters full tilt on renewable diesel, the fuel of the moment. Margins are strong, and every gallon builds experience for steady-state SAF production—scheduled to restart in early 2026, when the market opens wide and the credits align.

The company’s strategy combines feedstock flexibility, careful carbon-intensity optimization, and relentless modular expansion. The Reno facility—its fires first lit in February 2025—is already producing renewable diesel, tuning for steady-state SAF output next year. Its Alfa Laval pretreatment system allows the plant to pivot among feedstocks—soybean oil, distillers’ corn oil, tallow, or used cooking oil—mitigating volatility in a market where availability changes with every harvest and slaughter cycle.

Through a partnership with Posh Energy, excess propane-rich byproduct streams are captured and converted to zero-carbon electricity using Flex-Fuel Gensets, cutting both costs and carbon intensity while earning additional revenue from Renewable Energy Credits. FlyORO’s modular AlphaLite blending systems extend that logic downstream, allowing XCF to overcome one of SAF’s most prosaic yet paralyzing barriers: the lack of on-site blending at terminals and airports. The technology installs almost anywhere—a portable dock in an age still waiting for its pipeline.

It is a disciplined, modern captaincy.

“Every molecule has a margin, every gram of carbon a price,” Dange likes to say. XCF’s success lies not in novelty but in execution—steady yields, smart credit stacking, and pragmatic optimism that federal and state incentives will hold long enough for scale to bring cost down.

Where will we find enough of the Great White Whales?

And yet, a familiar weariness seeps through the optimism. The demand for low-carbon fuel is soaring—airlines pledging, governments mandating, markets hungrier than ever—and the supply of feedstock is falling behind. Soybean oil, distillers’ corn oil, tallow, used cooking oil: all spoken for, all rising in price. Fifty cents a pound, sixty, seventy. Every cent a reminder of the gap between the carbon we need and the carbon we have.

The new whalers are not short of courage or ingenuity; they are short of sea. The HEFA ocean is bounded by biology, acreage, and cost. The ships will sail as long as policy winds fill their sails—tax credits, carbon credits, clean-fuel standards—but they cannot meet the world’s hunger alone.

And always there’s the weather—regulatory squalls that can turn fair wind to headwind overnight. Shifting rules and credit formulas sometimes favor petroleum’s old fleet, leaving SAF producers to tack hard to keep course. “A purposeful push for petroleum,” one executive calls it—the modern echo of Captain Collier’s own “squalling, snuffling, measly set” in the cuddy, a noisy distraction to those trying to steer by compass instead of clamor.

The lamps will flicker again unless we find another source.

When Collier transferred his flag from the Elizabeth Starbuck to the Royal Saxon, he carried logs—towering fir and cedar from the Puget Sound, bound for the shipyards of the Eastern Pacific. Then, it was oil to light, wood to build and burn. Now, perhaps, it is wood to make oil: biocrude at sixty dollars a barrel, drawn from forest waste bought at forty a ton.

Collier would have laughed at the arithmetic. The old whaler knew the profit was leaner in timber, but it was safer than blubber and quieter than babies. In a letter home, he grumbled about the cabin passengers and their “four pups—the damndest squalling, snuffling, measly set that ever graced a decent cuddy. Why, man, it is pure Bedlam.” He would have shaken his head, lit his pipe, and muttered, “Give me mighty logs over mighty lungs—enough of these, and we’ll have some peace.”

And there lies the next horizon.

To make a truly affordable sustainable fuel, we need feedstock not at fifty cents a pound but at two—forty dollars a ton. Only then can we turn wood and waste into sixty-dollar biocrude—about $1.40 a gallon—and leave enough margin for the costly work of refining: reducing oxygen content from fifty percent down to twelve, covering transport, insurance, capital, and risk.

The good news is that the forest can provide. The DOE Billion Ton Study identifies more than 100 million tons of sustainably available wood residues in the U.S. at roughly that price—enough for seven to ten billion gallons of renewable fuel. The world holds vastly more, and someday even degraded lands may grow new wood as a living hydrocarbon reserve, a carbon bank replenished by sunlight instead of fossils.

XCF, too, is steering toward systems capable of turning agricultural residues, waste carbon, and renewable electricity into sustainable hydrocarbons. These pathways, like Collier’s log trade, promise steadier waters: scalable, less dependent on biology, and built for the long haul.

Carry on, you hunters of light

“Aye, the world’s turned curious since my day,” old Collier might say, puffing his pipe and eyeing the glow over Reno. “We had whales and wind, then stones that bled oil, and now you’re making fire from wood chips and bean mash. If that don’t beat all, I’ll eat my chart. I cussed, but I mean it—fine work, though I can’t tell if you’re mad or blessed.

“My cousin Sam Colt says his pistols make men equal. ‘God made men,’ he brags, ‘but Colonel Colt made them equal.’ Maybe this wood-oil you’re chasing will do the same. The good people of this world are far from being satisfied with each other, but these fuels—if they come from everywhere, belong to everyone—might be the best peacemakers yet.

“I’ve seen a place. I saw the Puget Sound afore you all did, you bustly, brawlin’, buildin’ biopeople, cracklin’ along at such high speed nowadays. For me, it is pickin’ up loads of spars at Port Gamble, bound for Australia or Calcutta. So many ports are miserable holes, but that side of the world—it’s first-rate country, and plenty of timber for all your oil. Makes me think of leavin’ sailorescing for good, burn my wharf at Shanghai, and throw in with you lot in this new world. Just as Horace Greeley says we oughter.

“So carry on, you hunters of light. Keep your boilers tight and your tempers cooler than your flares. I’ve hauled blubber, logs, and passengers, and paid in sweat for every ton. But I reckon if you can make oil from wood—clean and fair—you’ve found the true equalizer. That’s a match worth striking.”

And with that, Captain Collier gives a last nod to the horizon, pipe smoke curling into the dawn, and the Elizabeth Starbuck fades astern—its try-works long gone cold, its spirit burning still in the fires of a new age.