Christopher Lawrence
BCS, Incorporated
Currently, the U.S. military accounts for approximately four percent of the 20 million barrel per day U.S. consumption of petroleum.1 More than 73 percent of the military’s fuel consumption is in the form of jet fuel. Ground fuels account for 15.1 percent, and marine fuels account for the remainder. The Department of Defense (DoD) has acknowledged that relying on foreign sources of oil is becoming more of a risk to our forces. As a result of this acknowledgement, the Department of Defense has launched initiatives and partnerships aimed at diversifying its fuel resources and has already begun to explore the roles that biofuels will play in diversifying its fuel portfolio.
Exhibit 1: Military Fuel Consumption
In 2005, the Office of the Secretary of Defense announced the Clean Fuels Initiative. The Initiative partners the Department of Defense with the Department of Energy in order to produce various fuels from sources such as biomass, coal, natural gas, and other resources.2 The Clean Fuel Initiative has two prongs: The Total Energy Development Program (TED), which will attempt to catalyze the commercial production of alternative fuels, and the Joint Battlespace Use Fuel of the Future (J-BUFF) Program, which will concentrate on a single fuel for all of the military’s needs.3 The TED program will explore the use of biomass fuels. The Clean Fuels Initiative strives to develop fuels using Fischer-Tropsch (FT) technology which converts hydrogen and carbon monoxide into liquid hydrocarbons. Exhibit 2 displays the FT process.
Exhibit 2: Fischer-Tropsch Technology4
The Department of Defense recognizes that it will have to work with industry in order to ensure the deployment of alternative fuel technology if it expects to reach the goals of the Clean Fuels Initiative. The Department of Defense intends to guide winning technologies through the stages of development to deployment by playing an active role in constructing the first three fuel production facilities.5
In addition to the Clean Fuels Initiative, the Air Force is examining alternatives to petroleum-based jet fuel. Currently, the U.S. Air Force spends about five billion dollars a year on aviation fuel. 6 In July 2006, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) released a solicitation that sought to explore energy alternatives and efficiency for aircraft fuel. DARPA desires to develop jet fuel from agricultural resources, and this solicitation furthers DARPA’s BioFuels program, whose goal is to “develop an affordable alternative production process that will achieve a 60 percent or greater conversion efficiency, by energy content, of crop oil to military aviation fuel (JP-8) and elucidate a path to 90 percent conversions”.7 Currently, biodiesel fuels are lower in energy density than JP-8 fuel. Successful proposers to the solicitation will be expected to deliver a minimum of 100 liters of JP-8 surrogate biofuel to be used in federal government tests.8
In addition to Department of Defense initiatives, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 directs the Secretaries of Defense, Agriculture, Energy and the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency to establish an incentive program for the production of cellulosic biofuels. These incentives will be set through the use of a reverse auction. The Act directs that the Secretary of Energy hold the first auction no more than one year after the first 100,000,000 gallons of cellulosic biofuels are produced but no later than 3 years after passage of the Act. Presently, the agencies are working on coordinating this effort.9