Heard on the Floor at ABLC 2026: Panic, Cat Fights, and a $119 Wake-Up Call

By the time the Bioeconomy Policy Forum opened at ABLC 2026, the ground had already shifted.

Oil had surged past $119 a barrel. The Strait of Hormuz was in play. And inside the room, the instruction was simple: be candid, be fierce, and don’t waste time pretending things are fine.

“This session is notorious for being as candid as it gets,” I told the panelists.They did not disappoint.

“They have no idea how this works”

Mike McAdams, in his final ABLC appearance before retirement, didn’t ease into it. He went straight to the nerve.

“In Steve Miller’s office, they are idea generating on how to keep gasoline prices down,” he said. Then he paused. “I can assure you… the people in the room have no idea how the RFS works.”

Not disagreement. Not critique. Alarm. “This scares the pants off of me.”

Around him, heads nodded. Not because it was controversial—but because it felt plausible. Washington, in a moment of geopolitical stress, was improvising inside a system it didn’t fully understand. And the bioeconomy—after years of building—was once again exposed to decisions made in a hurry.

“This is presidential kryptonite,” I said. No one disagreed.

The cat fight

If Washington was the external pressure, the industry wasn’t exactly unified internally. “There was a real cat fight,” McAdams said, describing the battle between feedstock providers and fuel producers over access, imports, and control.

It’s a familiar story. In times of constraint, systems fragment. Feedstock versus fuel. Domestic versus imported. Policy versus market. Each group convinced it’s defending the future. Each, in the process, narrowing it.

And yet, as several speakers pointed out, the math doesn’t work without both. To hit scale, you need everything—domestic supply, international flows, and technologies that don’t yet exist at commercial scale.The irony: the closer the industry gets to success, the more fiercely it competes with itself.

Whoa, Nelly — California

Then came California.McAdams threw the first punch. “You’re all at one switch,” he said. “Domestic production for China.”

 That’s when the room shifted.

“Whoa, Nelly,” I said—because now it wasn’t policy analysis anymore. It was a live debate.

On one side: a warning that aggressive policy could drive out refining capacity, tighten supply, and push dependence offshore. On the other: a very different reality.

California, the rebuttal came from Graham Noyes, isn’t chasing ideology—it’s responding to lived experience. Wildfires. Insurance withdrawal. Air quality that still ranks among the worst in the country. “We care about climate disasters,”said Noyes. “We’re living them.”

Same system. Same data. Two completely different conclusions. And no easy way to reconcile them.

The Valley of Death (with jokes)

If policy was tense, finance was blunt. Jim Spaeth put numbers to what everyone knows but rarely says out loud: of roughly 100 announced SAF projects, fewer than 20% will reach final investment decision.

Most will stall. Some will fail. A few will scale. Why? Because the “Valley of Death” isn’t just a metaphor—it’s a filter. Rob Leachman of UC Berkeley described startups where the signal is buried under noise. Variability so high “you can’t tell what you’re doing.”

And then came the line that captured the room: “You’re trying to sell something you don’t have to someone that doesn’t want it.”

That’s not a market failure. That’s a stage-of-development problem.

Still, where some see wreckage, others see opportunity. Andy Logan described buying a $30 million fermentation plant for 10 cents on the dollar. The graveyard, it turns out, is also a parts bin.

Mic drops and glass reactors

Technology, meanwhile, refused to be discouraged. Pat Gruber, in his own farewell tour, pushed back hard against pessimism.

“The idea that we can’t feed the world was wrong,” he said. “Fundamentally wrong.”And when challenged on profitability, he didn’t hedge. “For God’s sakes, pay attention.” It landed like a mic drop—part frustration, part confidence, part exhaustion from repeating the same argument for a decade.

Then came something entirely different. Syzygy’s Ishan Rao described a photocatalytic reactor—made of glass—converting biogas into syngas with light. Glass. At $13 per gallon today, aiming for jet parity tomorrow. It sounded improbable. It also sounded like the kind of improbable that becomes obvious in hindsight.

The real stakes

By the end of the session, the through-line was clear. This isn’t just about carbon. It’s about sovereignty.

Eric McAfee told a story from 1977, when his Levi’s jeans disappeared in a Soviet hotel room after he refused to sell them on the black market. He flew home in borrowed clothes—and with a permanent impression. Systems that can’t produce, don’t persist. That lesson echoed across the room. From SAF to LPG to ethanol to new pathways not yet commercial, the question isn’t whether alternatives exist. It’s whether they can scale—fast enough, affordably enough, and reliably enough—to matter.

Hang together or hang separately

And that brought McAdams back for the final word.

After the warnings. After the arguments. After the cat fights. “We are the people in the room that know how to do something about it,” he said. A pause. “We should hold hands, love each other, and go to work.” It drew a laugh. Then something quieter. Because beneath the humor was the recognition that fragmentation—policy, market, or internal—comes with a cost.

And right now, with oil at $119 and the world on edge, that cost is rising. Fast.

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