Interviewed on 02/26/2025 Q: Can you tell us a bit about yourself, your role and your company? A: I'm Bruce Fleming. I'm the CEO of Montana Renewables. Montana Renewables was in 2024 the largest sustainable aviation fuel producer in the Western Hemisphere. I get a kick out of saying that but in a way, it's not saying much because there were only two and we were the larger of two – shout-out to World Energy, who was first. And that landscape will be changing fast. If somebody just pulled the statistics, you might misinterpret that SAF is on some kind of enormous annual average growth rate – it's not. There was one plant, now there are two plants. We took a step change – in 2025 there will be a third plant, there will be a fourth plant. We're in a very early formative stage of what promises to be a large global industry.   Q: Sustainable aviation fuel development is gathering momentum. What’s driving this growth? A: There is a supply shortage. What's driving the growth is demand pull. If I tried something – and I did try this, I found it entertaining, actually – and I asked: “How much SAF is there? Who makes the SAF? Where does the SAF come from?” You’d get all kinds of stuff that doesn't exist. Sourcing credible information this early in the birth of a new industry is its own challenge. People want to know what the SAF price is – that's difficult to discover. So, I think there are a lot of unique circumstances that would be different for every one of the plants that got FID, got constructed and got online, I think they're all going to be different. In our case, we had the hardware already in place to pull the SAF out at a very, very low capital cost, so we just elected to do that as a point of optimization or flexibility. Any former petroleum refiner is going to think that way. What we expect is the industry will be forming, will have a lot of very classical supply chain activity. At the end of the day, the customers are getting the same jet fuel that they use now. We happen to make it from a different renewable feedstock, and so this is all about marrying the producers and consumers with enough planning certainty that somebody is willing to finance the project. And every one of those so far has been bespoke.   Q: Montana Renewables is the largest producer of SAF in North America from your Great Falls biorefinery. What has the journey been like for your company as a pioneer in the SAF industry to get to where you are now? A: It was a pretty linear journey, and I think a pretty classical one. We've got a very good geographic location to be a petroleum refiner in the US. The thing we did that was differentiated is we wanted to keep that petroleum refinery going but still carve out a renewable feedstock lineup in the plant. So, we've actually got two different businesses that we host on the site and the crude oil refinery is otherwise pretty typical, pretty representative of a good refinery. Now, the renewable journey was quite interesting, and it went through a classical configuration study, looked at technical options, thought about the market. And the belief was that you could make a reasonably sound judgment on whether you wish to or not participate in renewable diesel. Off of that, it was an incredible speculation to participate in SAF. Anybody with a greenfield project that said, “I'm going to make a bet on SAF”, never got there. Those projects didn't happen. But recovery out of renewable diesel, that's what's leading the way. So, we set up a bet on renewable diesel. We set up a derivative on SAF, because we could do it at low risk and low cost and it gave us optionality. So that was pretty linear, but also, as I said earlier, a bit bespoke. At the end of 2024, after all of the talk and all of the years and all of the conventions and all of the thought and policy that has gone into this we have a whopping two plants in the Western Hemisphere – so very, very customized solutions. The next man up, depending how you want to read their investor materials, will either be Phillips 66 on the West Coast or the Diamond Green guys on the Gulf Coast. So, we expect there will be four people selling SAF into the market. That's still not a lot. If we've got a 0.1% penetration rate against the total Jet A fuel budget –huge demand, limited supply – it's a nascent period and we will see. I'm on record as not believing any SAF forecast more than 18 months out. And I will tell you, personally, I don't read them if they're more than 30 months out – it doesn't matter, you're making too many assumptions about the future, which will inevitably have to be adjusted. Here's a for instance: we thought we had this all pretty well positioned and optimized, and we turned on our SAF, and we had our distribution and into-airport partner.  And then in close succession, the US states of Illinois and Minnesota said, &