Renewable Diesel Boom and Market Transition Towards Resilience in Soybeans

The U.S. renewable diesel boom sharply expanded domestic soybean crushing, drawing a growing share of the crop into local processing and away from barge-borne exports down the Mississippi River. We ask whether this supply chain reorganization buffered inland soybean prices against river droughts. We estimate a storage-based structural VAR that allows crush activity to respond endogenously to market conditions, and identify river-disruption shocks using theory-based elasticity bounds. Holding crush activity at its pre-boom level, in the counterfactual analysis, reveals lower inland spot prices by 5.5 percent on average over 2021–2024. The resilience effect appears in spot prices and convenience yields, but not in futures prices, consistent with a local storage-demand channel. Our findings indicate that renewable diesel expansion changed not only the level of soybean demand, but also the price consequences of recurrent transportation shocks.