‘Great Green Fleet’ indefensible policy
Published 7:34 pm Friday, January 29, 2016
- A lone sailor aboard the USS John C. Stennis raises his arms above their head as the crew transitions from manning the rails after departing Naval Base Kitsap Bremerton in Bremerton, Wash., Friday, Jan. 15, 2016. The aircraft carrier is deploying to the Western Pacific Ocean for about seven months. (Meegan M. Reid/Kitsap Sun via AP)
The “Great Green Fleet” has set sail, charting a course to irrelevancy. The fleet – the U.S. Navy’s first carrier strike force to use a mix of biofuels and petroleum – is an example of bad policy colliding with bad timing.
“Last week, the U.S. Navy, with its accustomed pomp and fanfare, launched its first carrier strike group powered partly by biofuel – in this case, a blend made primarily from beef fat,” the journal Technology Review reported last week. “The biofueled warships form a central element of the Navy’s ‘Great Green Fleet’ program to draw half of its power from clean energy sources, rather than petroleum, by 2020.”
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Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said biofuels would give the U.S. a “strategic advantage,” weaning the Navy off imported oil and fluctuating markets.
None of that is true.
First, the claim that the U.S. cannot let itself be beholden to foreign oil-producing powers ignores the fracking revolution. The U.S. is now in the position of exporting oil. We have more than enough, and OPEC needs us more than we need them.
Second, there’s no market that fluctuates more than the biofuels market. And at present, the Navy is paying significantly more for the less-efficient biofuel than it would for petroleum.
“The Navy bought 77 million gallons of the 10 percent biofuel mix at $2.05 a gallon to fuel its ships off the West Coast this year,” the Guardian reported last week. “Similar contracts are in the works to fuel ships elsewhere. The purchase comes after a 2012 demonstration on the Navy’s use of alternative fuels drew fire from lawmakers outraged at the $26-per-gallon price tag. Legislators passed a law prohibiting the Pentagon from buying biofuels in mass unless the price is competitive with that of petroleum.”
But that law doesn’t prevent the Pentagon from supporting costlier research and pilot projects, as National Review pointed out: “One of the companies that got a lucrative biofuel contract from the military was the San Francisco-based Solazyme Inc. According to the Congressional Research Service, in 2009, Solazyme got a $223,000 contract for 1,500 gallons of algae-based motor fuel. That works out to $149 per gallon.”
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The irony is that biofuels aren’t even “green.”
The fuel takes far more energy to produce it than it produces itself. Most biofuel production causes “high levels of greenhouse gas emissions,” according to RAND Corp. researcher James Bartis, who has studied the Navy’s efforts.
Using the Navy to try to force blue-sky technologies is wrong.
As the Heritage Foundation’s David Kreutzer pointed out, “As a strategic policy, switching the military to biofuels can only make our enemies think we are not serious.”
That’s certainly the message we’re sending with the “Great Green Fleet.”
The Navy’s stated goal of obtaining a full 50 percent of its fuel from green sources by 2020 will only make matters worse. Either the budget will spike upward, or Navy accountants will have to find savings someplace else.
And that could mean a hit to readiness.