Military's wasteful spending to solve non existent problem

NY Times:

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.

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Why spend $27 a gallon to replace Middle Eastern fuel when we can replace it with American produced fuel if the Democrats would get out of the way of drilling for resources in this country and its territorial waters and allow the import of oil via the Keystone XL pipeline.  Spending all this money on funky fuels and the infrastructure to make it when we have fuel in the ground waiting for us to extract it is just nuts.

Why are we worried about Middle Eastern fuel when we have an idiotic block on the development of ANWR and offshore sites in this country.  The Obama energy policy is based on their carbon phobias and not common sense.  If we are going to burn fuel from the Middle East, why not burn fuel from the US .  Why not look at converting some of the ships to run on natural gas which we also have in abundance?   The biofuels scam is trying to solve a problem that no longer exists.