The Federal Trade Commission issued its 2025 Report on Ethanol Market Concentration on January 9, 2026, the annual accounting the Clean Air Act requires the agency to publish so fuel refiners and blenders can measure how consolidated the ethanol supply base is. The report, prepared by the FTC's Office of Policy Planning, tracks production capacity by company and region for the calendar year. Per the FTC, the statutory obligation dates to the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
This publication publishes information, not investment advice, and the report itself is descriptive rather than regulatory. Its dollar significance comes from what the market does with it.
Why does a competition agency track ethanol?
Congress wrote the reporting requirement into energy law because ethanol is both a fuel product and a regulated compliance good — refiners blend it to meet Renewable Fuel Standard volumes administered by the Environmental Protection Agency. When a commodity sits inside a federal mandate, concentration data stops being an academic statistic. A blender signing a multi-year supply contract, and a lender underwriting a terminal or a rail fleet, both price counterparty risk off how many producers of meaningful scale actually exist.
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What the data changes for buyers
Per the FTC's report page, the 2025 edition tracks market developments following recent administration actions affecting the fuel sector, a period in which the trade-weighted average US tariff rate rose to roughly 13.4 percent by January 2026, per Brookings tracking — a cost channel that reaches ethanol through imported fertilizer, equipment and feedstock. Producers with coastal export exposure and Midwest producers serving RFS-mandated blending face different demand curves, and the report's company-by-company capacity tables are the market's common reference for both.
- Refiners and blenders use the tables to satisfy their own supplier-diversification documentation under antitrust and fuel-contract due diligence.
- Merger lawyers screening acquisitions of ethanol plants compare proposed deals against the concentration the FTC itself documents.
- Grain handlers and rail operators read regional capacity shifts as a demand forecast for the coming planting and shipping season.
Why the capacity tables carry dollar weight
Roughly 15 billion gallons of ethanol are blended into the US fuel supply each year under the Renewable Fuel Standard's volume requirements, a figure EPA sets annually. At recent market prices near $1.50 to $2 per gallon, the commodity pool the report describes runs in the tens of billions of dollars. A one-notch shift in regional concentration changes where that spend consolidates, and which rail lines, terminal operators and grain handlers capture it.
What does this change?
The report carries no enforcement action, but it shapes the record on which future reviews rest. An agency that publishes concentration data annually has, by that act, defined the relevant market it will later use when an ethanol deal comes before it. Producers weighing consolidation have a fresh federal benchmark of how concentrated the industry already is — and, per the Clean Air Act's design, a reason to assume the next deal will be read against it. The next edition, covering 2026, will show whether tariff-driven input costs accelerated the consolidation this report measures.