Military Spending on Biofuels Draws Fire
By DIANE CARDWELL
When the Navy put a Pacific fleet through maneuvers on a $12 million cocktail of biofuels this summer, it proved that warships could actually operate on diesel from algae or chicken fat.
“It works in the engines that we have, it works in the aircraft that we
have, it works in the ships that we have,” said Ray Mabus, secretary of
the Navy. “It is seamless.”
The still-experimental fuels are also expensive — about $27 a gallon for
the fuel used in the demonstration, compared with about $3.50 a gallon
for conventional military fuels.
And that has made them a flash point in a larger political battle over government financing for new energy technologies.
“You’re not the secretary of energy,” Representative Randy Forbes, a
Republican from Virginia, told Mr. Mabus as he criticized the biofuels
program at a hearing in February. “You’re the secretary of the Navy.”
The House, controlled by Republicans, has already approved measures that
would all but kill Pentagon spending on purchasing or investing in
biofuels. A committee in the Senate, led by Democrats, has voted to save
the program. The fight will heat up again when Congress takes up the
Defense Department’s budget again in the fall.
The naval demonstration — known as the Great Green Fleet — was part of a
$510 million three-year, multiagency program to help the military
develop alternatives to conventional fuel. It is a drop in the ocean of
the Pentagon’s nearly $650 billion annual budget.
But with the Defense Department facing $259 billion in budget cuts over
the next five years, some lawmakers argue that the military should not
be spending millions on developing new fuel markets when it is buying
less equipment and considering cutting salaries.
This phase of the military’s exploration of alternative fuels began
under President George W. Bush and grew out of a task force that Donald
Rumsfeld, then the secretary of defense, convened in 2006 to explore
ways to reduce dependence on petroleum. If the military had less need to
transport and protect fuel coming from the Middle East, the thinking
went, the fighting forces could become more flexible and efficient, with
fewer lives put at risk.
In addition to biofuels, early efforts included developing liquid fuels from coal and natural gas
for the Air Force, the largest energy user of the armed services. But
the gas and coal fuels would not meet cost or environmental
requirements, officials said. The Defense Department focused on advanced
biofuels, which are generally made from plant and animal feedstocks
that don’t compete with food uses, which is a concern with common
renewable fuels like the corn-based ethanol used in cars.
The federal Renewable Fuel Standard, which sets targets for renewable
fuel production and requires a certain amount to be blended into
conventional gasoline and diesel, has been the main catalyst for the growth of several companies exploring new technologies.
Investors, however, have been leery of the enormous amounts of cash it
can take to bring the fuels from the lab to the gas tank. Industry
officials say that having a large, steady customer like the military
could attract other investors to help finance large refineries that
would bring costs down through economies of scale. Military officials
say that their purchases of small amounts for testing has already helped
reduce the cost. In 2009, the Pentagon spent roughly $424 a gallon on
algae oil from Solazyme.
“Finding a user like the military can rapidly help to scale technologies
that then are used in the civilian marketplace — it becomes a
catalyst,” said Bob Johnsen, chief executive of Primus Green Energy,
which is developing fuels from biomass and natural gas. “If the military
becomes a buyer, that becomes a means by which the production
facilities can be financed.”
The Defense Department is always vulnerable to charges of overspending —
remember the $7,600 coffee maker? — but military leaders argue that
what they are putting into biofuels is a blip given the potential
benefits of reducing their need for Middle Eastern oil, with all its
volatilities.
“Our primary rationale is not economic,” said Sharon E. Burke, assistant
secretary of defense for operational energy plans and programs. “Our
job is to defend the country.”
She said biofuel spending was just 4 percent of the $1.6 billion budget
the military was requesting for efforts to improve energy usage in field
operations in the next fiscal year. Most of the measures are aimed at
reducing the need for fuel in the first place, including using diesel
electricity generators more efficiently, putting greener engines into
vehicles and aircraft, and using hybrid solar generators and batteries
in the field.
The Defense Department is also running several demonstration projects on
its bases, testing ways to produce and distribute electricity better.
And the Army recently put out a request for proposals for $7 billion in
renewable energy projects, part of reaching its goal of getting a
gigawatt of its electricity — enough to power roughly 250,000 American
homes — from renewable sources by 2025.
In Congress, there is little apparent opposition to the overall military
push toward renewable power generation or energy efficiency.
But the biofuel program has struck a nerve among Republicans who, ever
since the government’s failed investment in the solar panel maker
Solyndra, have been wasting few opportunities to hammer their message
that the government should not risk taxpayer money to bolster favored
technologies.
Representative Mike Conaway, a Texas Republican who introduced House
legislation that would limit biofuel purchasing and production and has
been critical of the Great Green Fleet, said Democrats were using the
military to pursue an environmental agenda. “We just want to require the
Department of Defense to do exactly what every other American does when
they buy fuel: they try to get the best price they can,” he said.
Many of the lawmakers objecting to the biofuels program — including some
Democrats who crossed the aisle to support new limits — represent coal
country or take money from those in the coal and natural gas industries.
Mr. Conaway, who introduced a measure that would open the door for the
military to pursue alternative fuels made from coal and natural gas,
gets a large share of his campaign contributions from oil and gas
interests, according to OpenSecrets.org.
For Senator James Inhofe, who led a similar charge in the Senate, three
of his top five contributors, including Koch Industries, make their
money from fossil fuels. Although Mr. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican,
has argued that the biofuels are too expensive, he has helped steer
several military contracts to Syntroleum, based in Tulsa, Okla., to
develop a liquid natural gas fuel for the Air Force, including one that
paid the company roughly $22 a gallon. Syntroleum is still pursuing
coal- and natural gas-based fuels, but is also in a partnership with
Tyson Foods that supplied the Navy with biofuel made from waste animal
fat for the Green Fleet demonstration.
What happens to the military biofuels program could hinge on the fall
elections. The Obama administration has opened the government’s purse to
provide the kinds of stable contracts and investments that companies
say are necessary to raise financing to develop and build commercial
biofuel production facilities.
While Mitt Romney’s position on the military biofuels program is
unclear, he has signaled that the Pentagon’s emphasis on using more
clean energy would not be a priority in his administration. “When the
biggest announcement in his last State of the Union address
on improving our military was that the Pentagon will start using more
clean energy,” Mr. Romney said at the V.F.W. convention this summer,
“then you know it’s time for a change.”
Should that view prevail, the industry’s already slow development could
stagnate, with many of the smaller companies potentially going out of
business.
“Our dream was to build a renewable fuels company,” said Jonathan
Wolfson, Solazyme’s chief executive. Without the military as a
guaranteed customer, he said, it will be harder to get there. “Is it
going to stop us?” he added. “No.”Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/28/business/military-spending-on-biofuels-draws-fire.html?pagewanted=all
