Biofuel efforts continue with Blue Angels show
“The Green Angels” doesn’t have the same ring as the well-known moniker for the Navy’s flight demonstration team, but because of a performance this weekend, it may be more appropriate.
At a show at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., the F/A-18 Hornets are scheduled to fly with a 50-50 blend of fossil fuel and fuel made out of processed vegetable matter. It’s a first for the six-plane Blue Angels squad, but it’s increasingly common in Navy and Marine Corps aviation.
Late last month, a T-45C Goshawk training aircraft flew on the blended fuel, following a Marine MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, which used the blend for the first time two weeks earlier. In April 2010, an F/A-18F Super Hornet went supersonic on the fuel, and in November an MH-60S Seahawk helicopter used it.
They’re all a part of a drive by Navy Secretary Ray Mabus to reduce the country’s reliance on foreign sources of oil.
“We simply buy too much petroleum either from potentially or actually volatile places on earth,” Mabus told reporters in August.
He spent much of August drumming up interest in alternative energy, holding at least three media events, announcing a new energy degree at the Naval Postgraduate School, and addressing industry, government and academic power players. During the month, the Navy announced about $1 billion worth of green energy spending, including a $500 million, five-year contract for solar power in Hawaii and, in a cost-splitting partnership with the Energy and Agriculture departments, $510 million over three years for the private sector to produce marine and aviation biofuels for both military and commercial use.
On a conference call with reporters Aug. 16, Mabus said the $510 million advances the fledgling biofuels market.
Mabus is trying to put the Navy Department on pace to cut petroleum use in commercial vehicles in half by 2015, sail a strike group powered with a blend of alternative fuel by 2016, cut energy consumption ashore by 50 percent and make half of installations energy self-sufficient while getting half of the department’s energy from alternative sources by 2020.
There are conditions that must also be met, though. For example, biofuels must be cost-competitive with fossil fuels; biofuels can’t detract from the food supply — so far, aviation fuels have used seeds from camelina, a plant in the mustard family; and the fuels must work with existing military hardware without weakening performance.
It’s a major goal for Mabus and would have a significant effect on where sailors and Marines get the fuel in their trucks, aircraft and ships, but the opportunities for the private sector are outside the Navy. The Defense Department consumes only nine-tenths of 1 percent of all energy used in the country, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration show. Navy data show that across the DoD, the Navy and Marine Corps consume 34 percent of the military’s petroleum.