Military Signals Advanced Biofuels Demand: 336 Million Gallons per Year by 2020
by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) …This week in Honolulu, Chris Tindal of the US Navy joined advanced biofuels CEOs Jason Pyle of Sapphire Energy and Jonathan Wolfson of Solazyme at BIO’s Pacific Rim Summit, to discuss the scope and scale of the effort to provide the US Navy annually with 336 million gallons of drop-in advanced biofuels by 2020.
Chris Tindal, US Navy “We are trying to be out in front. Why? We are worrying about getting oil to the front line. For example, the majority of convoys going to forward areas are bringing fuel and water. Fuel ops are very vulnerable to attack. At present, 75 percent of our energy is consumed by our tactical groups, and only 25 percent by our shore installations.
(note: Biofuels Digest has elsewhere estimated that as many as 10 percent of US military casualties occur in the delivery of fuel to forward areas).
…“We need drop in replacements – we don’t have the time to do engine reconfigurations,… Our need? Jp-5 jet fuel and F-76 military diesel. By 2020 we need 8 million barrels of biofuel (336 million gallons), 4 million of each of F76 and JP-5. “
Jason Pyle, Sapphire Energy “Think about it, in 2007 no one was talking about drop in fuels, but we have woken up in the United States to the fact that we have 14 trillion dollars in liquid hydrocarbon infrastructure, and replacing that in a short period of time is a fantasy, and unnecessary, as we have all discovered. What we are asking for is to alter the energy mix, which has never been done without a national government’s intervention. …
Jonathan Wolfson, CEO, Solazyme “Let’s look at Hawaii. There are 123000 barrels per day coming into Hawaii from Asia and the Middle East. No one wants a repeat of things that happened in the past, but remember that here, Hawaii, is the front line, Pearl Harbor is the center of US defense against any threat that would ever come from the East.
Wolfson was asked about subsidies for renewable fuels. When people say no subsidies they mean no parity. An 80 dollar barrel of petroleum is not an 80 dollar barrel of petroleum. … (R)espected think tanks who look at the full cost of oil have concluded that the real cost is 7 to 12 dollars, not the fraction of that you are paying at the pump. READ MORE
