Powering Our Military: What's the Role of Clean Energy?
This week's question brought to you by Amy Harder of the Energy Experts Blog. Check out their responses.
How does clean energy fit into the military's mission? And what role should the military play in fulfilling President Obama's goal of creating an economy based on cleaner-energy sources?
The U.S. military is the single-largest industrial consumer of oil in the world. The Pentagon sees the goal of reducing its oil consumption as a national-security concern. The Obama administration has continuously touted the military's use of renewable energy, especially biofuels. Some Republicans in Congress have charged that the military should not spend money on expensive alternative fuels at a time when the nation needs to cut its trillion-dollar deficit.
In what ways--if at all--should the military fund its clean-energy initiatives? What specific types of alternative-energy sources would be best suited for the military's needs? Should Congress intervene? Will the military be a catalyst for the country to dramatically shift to cleaner-energy sources?
May 21, 2012 10:26 AM
The Story is Natural Gas
By Eric Farnsworth
Vice President, Council of the Americas
There should be no hesitation by the military to investigate the use of all energy sources in terms of cost, reliability, performance, and externalities be they related to national security or the environment. Generations of US policy-makers and political leaders have recognized the strategic vulnerabilities to the United States of an over-reliance on energy, primarily oil, from geopolitically-sensitive regions. (It's not "foriegn" oil that is the inherent problem; Canada, after all, is our top supplier.) Biofuels can play a role, although they will continue to be a niche product for some time. The real story is natural gas--important changes in technology have dramatically increased the ability to access domestic natural gas resources, at a very low cost. While not renewable, natural gas is a cleaner fuel without the same geopolitical issues as one finds with the Middle East, Venezuela, or Africa, because we have sufficient resources at home. It'd be up to the experts to determine whether natural gas can substitute for oil to fuel the multitude of machines on which the modern military relies. But it certainly needs to be a significant aspect of discussions going forward.