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Amid President Donald Trump’s directive to halt federal grants and loans, Calumet subsidiary Montana Renewables expects to wait just a bit longer to receive funds.
by Matt Hudson
Montana Free Press Local
Plans for a $782 million loan to a Great Falls biofuel plant were put on hold this week following the Trump administration’s directive to freeze federal grants and loans.
The delay prompted Calumet to notify investors that its subsidiary, Montana Renewables, was experiencing a “tactical delay to confirm alignment with White House priorities.”
The funds, the first part of a $1.67 billion loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy, will support Montana Renewables’ expansion of its biofuel plant in Great Falls.
Montana Renewables CEO Bruce Fleming told Montana Free Press on Wednesday that the distribution is still on hold, but the company is confident that the process will resume once the proper reviews are made.
“We would all want the government agencies to be following the lead of the executive branch and not going off on their own,” Fleming said. “So I think stopping to check signals when you’re not sure works for me.”
The funding freeze was a rollercoaster ride that started with a Trump administration memo late Monday calling for a temporary pause and review of all federal grants and loans. The directive caused uncertainty across the country as federal funding recipients scrambled to assess the scope and impact of the funding freeze.
Late Tuesday, a federal judge blocked the immediate implementation of the funding freeze. The Trump administration then announced on Wednesday that it was rescinding the order, though its scrutiny of federal funding programs is expected to continue.
While some recipients of federal dollars could only speculate on the potential impacts of the freeze, Calumet experienced a real delay in funds that they had expected this week. The company closed on the loan on Jan. 10, and Fleming said it had planned to sign documents to receive the first disbursement.
“We were literally gearing up to execute that and somebody said, ‘Wait a minute,’” he said.
Calumet’s investor notice on Tuesday, called a “timing update,” said that the $782 million portion of the loan was previously approved for funding that same day. Fleming said that the company expects the delay to be days or weeks while the Trump administration assesses its priorities.
“Total accident of timing that we straddled a change in administration,” Fleming said.
The loan guarantee to Calumet was made as part of a program in former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, a trillion-dollar package that includes incentives for clean energy production to meet federal climate goals. Trump has vowed to unwind the act and other Biden climate actions, but it isn’t yet clear to what extent that will happen. On Jan. 20, Trump issued an executive order calling for a pause on funding programs through the IRA and the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Trump’s order briefly mentions the administration’s support for “biofuels,” which Calumet CEO Todd Borgmann highlighted in Tuesday’s investor update. It suggests, as others have done, that the administration may pick winners and losers in its effort to repeal select climate measures in the IRA.
“I take that to mean that the president and his team and his administration recognizes and understands and values the role that domestic agriculture-based biofuels can add and offer to strategy to unleash American energy,” Kurt Kovarik, vice president of federal affairs at Clean Fuels Alliance America, told MTFP on Wednesday. The trade organization represents producers of products like biodiesel and sustainable aviation fuels.
Kovarik, who is based in Washington, D.C., said that biofuels have received bipartisan support from lawmakers. Last year, 18 Republican members of Congress urged Speaker Mike Johnson to retain energy tax credits in attempts to repeal the IRA. Calumet could benefit from some of those credits.
Bipartisan support also found Calumet, which created Montana Renewables as a subsidiary in 2021 with plans to retrofit the Great Falls refinery for biofuel production. Upon announcement of the Energy Department loan commitment, former Sen. Jon Tester, a Democrat, took a victory lap in his support for the deal. Republican Sen. Steve Daines is featured in a video on Montana Renewables’ website, and Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte toured the facility last fall, touting the facility’s economic impact and working toward his “all-of-the-above” energy approach.
While growing its biofuel segment, the Calumet refinery in Great Falls still uses Canadian crude oil to produce conventional gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and asphalt. Montana Renewables is housed in the same facility.

Montana Renewables’ products include sustainable aviation fuels, which were touted by the Biden administration as “the only viable near-term option to decarbonize the airline industry” by reducing airplane emissions.
Montana Renewables’ long-term goal is to leverage area farmers to source feedstock materials, like seed oils and beef tallow. If the area got a critical processing facility — a seed crushing plant — the Great Falls plant could support many times the levels of current ag production for certain crops.
“If we could have the infrastructure like a crushing plant closer, there’s tremendous potential for what Montana Renewables is doing,” said Scott Kulbeck, executive vice president for the Montana Farm Bureau Federation, in an interview with MTFP.
Groups like the federation are closely watching developments at Montana Renewables. The Golden Triangle Resource Council, a conservation and ag group, previously amplified concerns about the planned injection of wastewater from biofuel production underground in Pondera County. Landowners and county commissioners pushed back on the proposal, which is still under review. On Wednesday, a member of the resource council supported Montana Renewables’ plans to build a wastewater treatment plant at the Great Falls site.
“It’s disappointing that those plans faced uncertainty due to reckless political posturing, but we hope the threat of pulling funds is behind us,” said council member Steve Grout in an emailed statement to MTFP Wednesday. “Too much work and planning have already gone into this, and we look forward to continued work with Calumet to implement a common-sense plan that protects the irreplaceable resources we all rely upon.”
The wastewater treatment plant would be part of a much larger biofuel expansion planned at Montana Renewables. The expansion would more than double Montana Renewables’s capacity to an estimated 315 million gallons annually. According to the company, it would produce half of North American sustainable aviation fuel.
That expansion is dependent on the federal government’s loan guarantee — a $1.67 billion package that includes $233 million of capitalized interest. Fleming, the Montana Renewables CEO, said that some planning and early engineering work has been underway. But once the loan funds come in, the company can move toward putting shovels in the ground. Calumet has committed to adding 40 permanent jobs and as many as 450 construction jobs in the expansion.
For Calumet, a century-old oil and gas producer, it was no small feat to make the pivot toward biofuels.
“To be able to do that, it was a huge bet,” Fleming said. “We bet the company on this. And the company’s been around for a long time, so that was not taken lightly.”
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