Tuesday - December 13, 2011

The Greening Of The Fleet

Or should I have called this post “The Fleecing of the Green”?

A California company has been hired to provide 450,000 gallons of advanced biofuels to the U.S. Navy – the “single largest purchase of biofuel in government history,” according to the Navy – at $15 per gallon, or about four times the market price of conventional jet fuel.

And gosh, you’d better sit down for this one: Solazyme, the company that got the contract, not only is the recipient of $21.8 million in Obama’s Green Stimulus deal, on the company’s board sits T.J Galuthier, Clinton’s Deputy Secretary and Chief Operations Officer of the Department of Energy from 1999 to 2001, who also served on President Obama’s White House Transition Team, where he worked on the energy provisions of the stimulus package. A triple coincidence, imagine that. The guy who wrote the green stimulus is now in charge of a company that got a big fat green stimulus handout.

[Secretary of the Navy] Mabus notes that this 450,000-gallon buy — while comparatively large for military biofuels — is still tiny compared to the amount of fuel the Navy and the commercial airline industries consume. He’s promised that as the Navy buys more fuel, economies of scale will kick in, and prices will drop. But an MIT study of alternative jet fuels, conducted in association with the Navy, found that even under optimal conditions — with dozens of refineries up and running — the price of bio jet fuel would still be twice as high as the cost of the traditionally made stuff.

Read all about it here. And here. And here.

It ain’t easy goin’ green. Especially when we have enough regular oil right here in our own country, to run the military for the next couple of centuries. And I do hope that this algae derived fuel they’re buying works a whole lot better than the recycled french fry oil bio-fuel that’s out there. That stuff tends to clog the heck of diesel injectors on tractors and bulldozers and stuff whenever it gets cold. Oops.

I gather the whole carrier group is going to use this fuel on a test trip across the Pacific. I wonder how big the Navy’s fleet of tow trucks tow ships is?

Posted by Drew458     on 12/13/2011 at 02:24 PM   
Filed Under: • Military • Oil, Alternative Energy, and Gas Prices •  
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