Military Spending on Biofuels Is Under Fire

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Military Spending on Biofuels Is Under 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.

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