The soybean oil/heating oil (BOHO) futures price spread continued to widen this week, slowly creeping toward $1 per gallon. The BOHO price spread is used as a proxy to measure the profitability of producing biodiesel from soybean oil as a feedstock. The wider the price spread, the more costly production becomes and vice versa.

At the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, July soybean oil futures settled at $0.4572 per lb on Thursday May 30, down by just 16 basis points or 0.35% from $0.4588 per lb a day earlier. Ultra-low sulfur heating oil futures, meanwhile, ended the Thursday session at a near one-year low of $2.3694 per gallon, down by 6.76 cents or 2.77% from $2.437 per gallon on Wednesday May 29.

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