Enabling the Navy's Great Green Fleet

by Louise Poirier (Fuel Magazine/Ethanol and Biofuels News/Hart Energy) Amid persistent concerns about supplying the enormous energy demands of the United States' armed forces, the military is pursuing alternatives, and the Department of the Navy is leading the way.
For a fleet that uses more than 16 million bbl of fuel each year, the price and supply/demand volatility of petroleum-derived energy resources weigh heavily on finances, security of supply and the resulting environmental footprint. And those very constraints are some of the key driving forces behind the U.S. Navy’s alternative fuels initiative that began about two years ago.
...There’s more to it than just energy security though, said Rear Admiral Philip Cullom, director of the Navy’s Energy and Environmental Readiness Division, which coordinates the Navy’s alternative energy efforts.
The move is also about ensuring the mobility of the Navy’s forces, Cullom said, being as efficient as possible in the sense that efficiency grants additional combat capability by extending tactical range “by not using as much fuel, [which] is a terribly important thing in combat … as we found out in every major conflict since we’ve been using something other than wind or people power to do what we do,” he said. “We’ve found that energy resources can either become your albatross or it can be the tactical advantage that helps you win.”
Energy, he emphasized, needs to be viewed as a strategic resource and tactical advantage.
“Energy security comes in a lot of different flavors and energy security is, the way the secretary looks at it from a national perspective, the ability to not be beholden to fuel sources that may be challenged in terms of our availability to be able to use them,” Cullom said. “And also from an economic perspective, to be able to develop new fuel sources in the United States of America that exist here today that will allow us to not have to have a balance of payment continually going in one direction. And that’s precisely the national view that the country needs to look at it in.”
... “What we envision is that as an alternative fuel is qualified, we’re going to just tweak the existing specification to allow this fuel to be procured by DLA [Defense Logistics Agency Energy]. The current specification will be revised where it says fuel shall be derived from conventional sources including crude oil and shale oil to say it can also come from these new alternative sources,” Toms explained. “The specification revision should be complete sometime next year. Our long-term goal is to revise the specification, but we must first complete the protocol and qualification of the alternative fuel.”
...The Navy’s next test will center on an Allison gas turbine generator, Cullom said, and the initial steps of that testing process began in mid-January.
“This is a marine gas turbine and with the ultimate certification of that for biofuels, that allows us to be able to power all of our surface combatants – frigates, destroyers and cruisers – with biofuel as well,” Cullom explained. “And these are all the building blocks towards sailing the Great Green Fleet, demonstrating it in 2012, and then ultimately being able to deploy it in 2016.”
...One of the main issues is that biofuels have no aromatic compounds, both Kamin and Toms pointed out, which are critical to fuels for two reasons: first, they increase the density of fuel, which is critical for shipboard stability, distribution of fuel within a ship, as well as performance and range; and second, aromatics help older non-metallic elastomers materials swell, which creates a sealing action that keeps joints very leak-tight. READ MORE
From sidebar:
One of the crucial elements to the Navy’s fuel certification procedures is “fit for purpose” testing. What that is, as Rick Kamin, the Navy’s Fuels Team lead for aircraft, explained, “is a step beyond the specification. It’s looking at some of those properties that have been inherent with petroleum that we don’t test for but we’ve built our weapons systems around,” Kamin said. “Things like dielectric constant from the aviation side. It’s a critical parameter that the tank gauging systems use on our aircraft, so we have to make sure that even though we don’t test for it in the specification when we buy the fuel that the same design limits in the fuel hold regardless of source.
“Auto ignition temperature, again, is something that petroleum has a well-defined limit to – it’s an issue for shipboard safety. It’s properties like that that we look at that we just want to make sure that the petroleum box that all of our weapons systems have been defined and designed to that use biofuels or alternative fuels perform exactly the same way.” READ MORE