Biofuels Play a Role in Military Energy Security
by Callie Fishburn* (Advanced Biofuels USA) At the January 12th Pew Project-sponsored conference,” Power Begins at Home: Assured Energy for U.S. Military Bases,” the subject of biofuels and their contribution to military energy security failed to come up. The conference, held at the Pew Charitable Trust building in Washington D.C., featured short presentations from the Assistant Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force for Installations, Environment, and Energy.
Each secretary detailed their plans to strengthen energy security at military installations, and briefly addressed the likely future of energy development under the new administration. The recurrent theme of the event was protecting vulnerable power grids, upon which military bases depend, from physical and cyber-attacks.
Although biofuels were not highlighted during the conference, each of the assistant secretaries affirmed the continued importance of biofuels as a method of energy security. According to Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Dennis McGinn, the Navy plans to continue purchasing biofuel for its Great Green Fleet, and he believes the future of biofuel lies in bulk solicitations from private companies.
Great Green Fleet during RimPac 2012 — US Navy photo
The Army is also invested in biofuels, and has formed a partnership with Hawaii Electric. The Hawaiian firm is currently constructing a 52-megawatt biofuel plant at Scofield Barracks, which it hopes to have operational by 2018. Assistant Secretary of the Army, Katherine Hammack, acknowledged that the decreasing cost of biofuels have made them a “viable alternative.”
The Air Force also has a vested interest in continuing to work with biofuels, because as Assistant Secretary Miranda Ballentine asserted, approximately eight billion of the Air Force’s nine-billion-dollar budget goes toward jet fuel. The Air Force has taken steps to certify all its aircraft to operate on several types of fuel, including biofuel blends, and has conducted extensive tests on a variety of biofuels.
The conference concluded with a presentation from Chief Scientist of Noblis, Dr. Jeff Marqusee, about current research into energy security measures. Although Dr. Marqusee said that his firm is not currently working on any research or development related to biofuels, he acknowledged their growing potential as an alternative fuel.
The primary solution to energy security that he offered in his presentation, was the installation of microgrids as a more resilient alternative to standalone generators. Microgrids are a system of distributed energy resources (which can include any available on-site power source) that can operate independently of the commercial grid. According to Noblis research, diesel microgrids are cheaper and more reliable than standalone generators. Could these diesel microgrids and the military’s current diesel generators eventually be made to run on biodiesel? Dr. Marqusee admitted that it is certainly possible, but will depend heavily on cost, and improving biodiesel’s long-term storage capability. READ MORE (Associated Press) and MORE (Reuters/Yahoo!)
*Callie Fishburn, an Environmental Science and Policy student at Hood College in Frederick, MD, interned with Advanced Biofuels USA during the winter break preparing educational materials and covering this event.
