In 1943 American warships fought fuel fires with foam made from soybeans. Then the Navy invented something better, and it never went away. The Pentagon has now moved its deadline to stop using it three times.
In December 1943, Time magazine ran a short business item under the headline "Navy Bean Soup." A company called National Foam System had found a way to make firefighting foam from soybeans, the magazine reported, and early in 1942 the Navy had "swamped" it with an order for 200,000 gallons. The company broke ground on a new plant and turned out its first batch seven weeks later. Sailors pumped the stuff onto burning oil and gasoline. In one Pacific sea fight, Time said, 118 warship fires "were reportedly snuffed out by foam."
The item did not say where the soybean part came from. It came from the Glidden Company in Chicago, where the director of research for soya products, a chemist named Percy Julian, had built a plant to isolate protein from soybeans. National Foam's researchers found that Glidden's protein made an excellent fire foam. Glidden sold it to them, and they sold the foam to the Navy.
Julian was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1899. His grandfather had been enslaved. He graduated first in his class at DePauw, earned his doctorate in Vienna, and in 1935, with a colleague, Josef Pikl, completed the first total synthesis of physostigmine, a drug used to treat glaucoma. He would be elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1973. After he moved his family to Oak Park, Illinois, arsonists set fire to the house on Thanksgiving Day, 1950. The following June someone threw a dynamite bomb at it.
Time's story about the foam that protected American warships mentioned neither him nor his company.
Eight decades later, at a farm show in West Fargo, North Dakota, firefighters set fire to diesel fuel in a barrel that had been cut in half, sprayed foam around it to keep it from spreading, and then put it out. The foam was made from soybean flour.
Between those two fires lies the story of the foam that replaced bean soup: a Navy invention built to smother burning jet fuel, made from chemicals that do not break down in soil, in water or in people. In 2019 Congress told the Pentagon to stop using it on its bases. On July 31 the department moved that deadline for the third time, to October 2027. Its own numbers show where the work has stalled. It is not in the fire trucks. It is in the buildings.
I.
Protein foam worked, but jets changed the problem: by the 1960s carrier decks were lined with aircraft full of jet fuel. In September 1963 two scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory, Richard Tuve and Edwin Jablonski, filed a patent for a foam built on fluorinated chemistry. It spread a thin film across burning fuel and cut off the vapor feeding the fire. The Navy called it aqueous film-forming foam, or AFFF.
Then came the fires. On July 29, 1967, a rocket accidentally fired on the flight deck of USS Forrestal off Vietnam, and the blaze that followed killed 134 men. In January 1969, USS Enterprise burned. After those fires, by the laboratory's own account, the Navy pressed for better firefighting agents, and AFFF replaced protein foam aboard its carriers. From there it went into crash trucks, hangar sprinkler systems and fuel depots, and then to civilian airports and city fire departments.
The chemistry that made it work belongs to the family now called PFAS, and the fluorine bonds that make the film possible also make the chemicals nearly impossible to break down. Firefighting foam is not used once and thrown away, either. It is sprayed on purpose, in training and in testing, onto the ground.
The department now counts 727 installations that need to be assessed for PFAS releases. Its estimate of the cleanup bill, as of January 2025, is $9.35 billion. 3M, the largest maker of the foam, agreed in 2023 to pay public water systems $10.3 billion. DuPont and two related companies agreed to $1.185 billion.
In Clovis, New Mexico, next to Cannon Air Force Base, the chemicals reached the wells of Highland Dairy. The owner, Art Schaap, could no longer sell his milk, and in the end he was forced to euthanize all 3,665 of his cows. The state put his loss at $5,946,462. "They need to own the pollution," he said of the Air Force, in a statement the state released.
II.
Congress set the first deadline in December 2019: no more fluorinated foam at military installations after October 1, 2024, with a waiver and one extension allowed. The department used both. In December 2025 Congress rewrote the rule, reset the deadline to October 1, 2026, and granted two fresh waivers. The department used the first of those on July 31. The date is now October 1, 2027, and one more extension is available.
One thing the law has never touched is ships. The 2025 rewrite made the exemption for oceangoing vessels permanent. The foam invented for carrier decks will stay on carrier decks.
A timeline from the Navy's 1943 soybean foam to the July 2026 waiver that moved the deadline for bases to October 1, 2027.
| Item | What happened | Deadline for bases |
|---|---|---|
| 1943 | Time reports the Navy's soybean foam, "Navy Bean Soup" | — |
| 1963 | Navy scientists file the patent for fluorinated foam (AFFF) | — |
| 1967 | Fire on USS Forrestal; the Navy seeks better agents | — |
| Dec 2019 | Congress orders fluorinated foam off military installations | Oct 1, 2024 |
| Aug 2024 | Waiver | Oct 1, 2025 |
| Jul 2025 | Extension | Oct 1, 2026 |
The department's explanations have been consistent. The switch is "complex, time-consuming, and supply-constrained," Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote to Congress in August 2024. A briefing the following spring added another reason: "a shift in the Department's priorities." Firefighters have been less patient.
When House lawmakers proposed stretching the timeline in 2025, Evan Davis, director of government affairs for the International Association of Fire Fighters, told The New Lede, a news site published by the Environmental Working Group: "So we don't see why DOD needs to have this delay in the implementation timeline."
The department's July briefing to Congress is the clearest picture of where things stand.
Interactive evidence
About 1,000 facilities and more than 7,400 vehicles and mobile units are in scope. The trucks are nearly done; the buildings are not.
Old foam has been removed from 87 percent of installation fire trucks, crash trucks and portable units, 32 percent of tactical vehicles and 31 percent of buildings.
| Measure | Share removed and disposed of |
|---|---|
| Fire trucks, crash trucks and portable units | 87% |
| Tactical vehicles | 32% |
| Buildings: hangars, fuel systems | 31% |
The old foam has been removed from 87 percent of the fire trucks, crash trucks and portable units on its installations, 32 percent of its combat vehicles and 31 percent of its buildings.
The gap is easy to explain. Taking the foam out of a truck means draining a tank and flushing it. A hangar's system is plumbed into the building and designed around one product. Replacing the product can mean new proportioners and new nozzles, or a different way of fighting the fire altogether: water-only sprinklers, high-expansion foam, floors that drain burning fuel away before it can pool.
The Government Accountability Office has put the cost of the whole transition, vehicles and buildings together, at more than $2.1 billion.
Nor is it a question of having nothing to switch to. The military published its specification for fluorine-free foam in January 2023 and has since qualified replacement products against it. Sixteen fuel storage tanks still need a replacement agent that, in the department's words, "has not been approved for purchase." Most buildings are simply waiting their turn. Those awaiting conversion, the briefing says, are "locked out/tagged out," which means the systems have been switched off rather than switched over.
Brunswick, Maine, shows what an old system can do in the meantime. The Navy closed its air station there in 2011, and a civilian redevelopment authority inherited the hangars with the foam still inside them. They are not covered by the Pentagon's deadline, and the Navy says they are no longer its responsibility. On August 19, 2024, the system in Hangar 4 went off by accident.
It released 1,450 gallons of foam concentrate mixed with 50,000 gallons of water, the biggest such spill in Maine in thirty years, the Portland Press Herald reported. The authority's director, Kristine Logan, told the paper that flame detectors in a neighboring hangar had been covered to avoid another accidental discharge. Taking the systems out of three hangars was estimated at about $8 million.
Removing them, disposing of the foam and installing replacements was a different number: the authority asked the governor's office and the Federal Aviation Administration for $21.9 million.
III.
A volunteer fire department has no waiver to apply for. Twenty-six states now restrict PFAS foam, according to researchers at the University of Arizona's Udall Center, and the pressure does not come only from statehouses. Karolin Jappe, the emergency manager for McKenzie County, in North Dakota's oil patch, told the North Dakota Monitor that when volunteers turn out for a fire at an oil facility, the company will sometimes ask whether there is PFAS in their foam.
For the people holding the hose it is also a health question. A federal study of nearly 30,000 career firefighters in three big cities found 9 percent more cancer diagnoses and 14 percent more cancer deaths than in the general population, an increase the researchers called modest. In 2022 the World Health Organization's cancer agency concluded that working as a firefighter causes cancer.
The next year it classified PFOA, a PFAS chemical associated with firefighting foams, as carcinogenic to humans, and PFOS, the main fluorinated ingredient of the older 3M foams, as possibly so. No study ties any one firefighter's illness to foam, and chiefs are not waiting for one. In Boone County, Missouri, the fire protection district put a soybean-based foam on one engine in the summer of 2025 and planned to switch entirely once its old stock ran out.
The point, Assistant Chief Gale Blomenkamp told KOMU-TV, was to do "whatever we can do to protect our firefighters, our volunteers, our paid staff."
The product is SoyFoam, from a Georgia company called Cross Plains Solutions, developed with money from the United Soybean Board, the farmer-funded group that promotes the crop. Most soy products use the oil. This one uses flour milled from the protein-rich meal, the same part of the bean Julian's plant was built to work with. The Agriculture Department's BioPreferred program certifies it as 84 percent biobased.
In the GreenScreen registry, which screens a product's ingredients for hazards such as cancer and persistence in the environment, it is the only firefighting foam rated Gold. Every other foam listed is Silver.
John Hejl would like it to work. He is the chief of the Casselton Volunteer Fire Department, west of Fargo, and he farms soybeans; he has also appeared in the North Dakota Soybean Council's promotion of the foam. He told the Monitor he had been looking for an alternative to PFAS foams and was impressed with this one. His case for foam of any kind is practical. Fight a burning railcar of diesel with water alone, he said, and it takes hundreds of thousands of gallons.
"So by the time you put it out, it's flowed into every ditch and stream and waterway for miles. If we can cover it with a blanket of foam and keep it in the ditch, then we've protected the lake and the river and the stream."
He had a farmer's reason, too. "We have more meal than we know what to do with," he said.
IV.
SoyFoam is not the military's answer, at least not yet. It is not among the products on the military's qualified list cited here, and Grist reported in 2025 that the Pentagon had not tested it. Nor does it hold UL 162, the listing many airports and city departments require before they will buy a foam for fuel fires. Its maker recommends a 3 percent mix for flammable liquids, which is a recommendation, not a listing.
The most recent account of its progress comes from the soybean board itself, which said in June that the company is pursuing both.
Its maker will not say what else is in it, calling the formula proprietary. That bothers Mohamed Ateia Ibrahim, an adjunct assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice University. "We need more clarification about the other components," he told Grist, "and whether they are, as a whole, really better or not."
Fluorine-free foams in general ask more of the people who use them. The GAO found that some cannot tolerate certain temperatures or be premixed with water ahead of time, which rules them out of some existing systems, and that military firefighters had not been fully trained on them. Even people who spend their days cleaning up after the old chemistry concede what it could do.
"While PFAS contamination is bad and something that we're sorting through, it's very effective as a firefighting foam," Adam Driscoll, an engineer with the Minneapolis firm Barr Engineering, told a waste-management conference in Bismarck in 2024. "And folks whose lives have been saved by it likely appreciate that."
V.
The replacement foams are qualified, and the old foam is out of most of the military's fire trucks. What is left is plumbing, training grounds and money, spread across about a thousand buildings, and every waiver makes it easier to leave that work for next year. The cleanup bill for the old foam already stands at $9.35 billion.
Outside the fence line nobody gets a waiver. A chief decides with a barrel of burning diesel at a farm show, a registry of hazard ratings, and the test reports he knows to ask for.
In 1943 the chemist whose protein made the Navy's foam work went unnamed. Eight decades later, firefighters in farm country are putting soybeans on burning fuel again. It took a chemical that will outlast everyone who ever sprayed it for the idea to come back around.
The Green Brief is published by Patriot BioSolutions, which sources biobased products for government buyers. As of publication it has no commercial relationship with any company named in this article.
| Dec 2025 | Congress rewrites the rule, resets the clock, exempts ships for good | Oct 1, 2026 |
|---|
| Jul 31, 2026 | Waiver | Oct 1, 2027 |
|---|
