Klobuchar Tours Bushmills Ethanol Plant, Urges Permanent E15 Legislation

Standing before a wall-sized map of ethanol plants stretching coast to coast, Erik Osmon had a clear point to make to his visitor: this industry is everywhere, and Minnesota is at its center.

Osmon, general manager of Bushmills Ethanol near Atwater, guided Sen. Amy Klobuchar through the farmer-owned cooperative on March 30, walking her through an automation control room and a testing station before pausing at the map. The tour landed days after President Donald Trump signed an executive order allowing E15 gasoline, blended at 15 percent ethanol, to be sold nationwide through the summer, while also removing federal restrictions on E10 sales.

Bushmills officials welcomed the order, but Klobuchar left the facility pressing for something more durable. "I would like to see it baked into law so it is not just each president every year who makes a decision," she said. She sharpened that argument elsewhere on her recess swing, warning the policy shouldn't be "at the mercy of who the president is, or always asking whether it's a Democrat or Republican."

To get there, Klobuchar is working with Sen. John Boozman, a Republican from Arkansas, on bipartisan legislation codifying year-round, nationwide E15 availability. She has been down this road before. In 2023, she and Sen. Deb Fischer of Nebraska reintroduced similar legislation; it was referred to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and went no further.

The legislative push draws on real scale. Minnesota ranks fifth in U.S. ethanol production, with 18 plants running a combined nameplate capacity of over 1.4 billion gallons annually. Leaders from the Minnesota Bio-Fuels Association joined Klobuchar at Bushmills, which produces ethanol, distillers' grains, and corn oil, with output supporting agricultural markets across the state.

In Otter Tail County, where the Perham Focus carried the story through its regional network, the stakes have their own shape. The Green Plains ethanol plant north of Fergus Falls is the anchor of a proposed Summit Carbon Solutions pipeline that would run approximately 28 miles through Otter Tail and Wilkin Counties before crossing into North Dakota near Breckenridge. The $4.5 billion project aims to link 32 ethanol plants across five states via roughly 2,500 miles of carbon capture infrastructure. The proposal has drawn both strong interest and sustained public scrutiny from county residents since its announcement.

The Bushmills stop was one of three industry visits Klobuchar made during Congress's Easter-Passover recess, alongside tours of 3M's facility in Hutchinson and the Minnesota Poultry Testing Lab in Willmar. Whether the Boozman partnership produces a Senate floor vote, or stalls again in committee as it did in 2023, will determine whether year-round E15 survives the next change in administration.