The administration's latest energy boondoggle is a $510 million cellulose biofuel program to produce fuel for the Department of Defense in the name of national security. US Air Force and Navy flight tests do show that a 50-50 blend of certain biofuels with conventional aviation gas does function well in military aircraft.
"We buy too much fuel from volatile places. The price shocks and the supply shocks are simply unacceptable for a military organization to sustain," Navy Sec. Ray Mabus told reporters.
But as Minnesota Congressman Collin Peterson points out, producing this new fuel requires costly additional processing, making it unlikely to ever become an affordable alternative to fossil fuel.
Undersec. of the Air Force Erin Conaton said recently, "Right now, biomass fuel is about 10 times the cost of JP-8, the current military aviation jet fuel."
Undaunted, President Obama has announced a $510 million taxpayer program to support four new plants to produce military fuels from nonfood stocks like corn residue and algae. Unfortunately, that approach, if it works, will be even more expensive than current biofuel methods which use the fruit of the plant, corn kernels, and soybeans.
In addition, substantial amounts of fossil fuel are also needed to gather up, bale, and transport crop residue to a processing plant. And it takes a whole lot of that biomass to make a little bit of transportation fuel. Nature required 90 tons of plant material and a million years to make a gallon of the crude oil that we extract today.
There is no shortage of conventional proven aviation and other fuels for our military. It is all available from secure US refineries, which process crude oil from friendly North American sources. We have yet to identify a process to manufacture cellulose biofuels. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 calls for the production of 250 million gal of cellulosic ethanol in 2011. We will struggle to produce 4 million gal, for lack of an effective production process.
In 1819, Henri Braconnot, a French chemist, first discovered how to unlock the sugars from cellulose by treating biomass with sulfuric acid, a process used today. But 200 years of effort has yet to get the process beyond the pilot plant stage.
"When the biofuel industry is able to provide the quantity of fuel the Air Force requires at a good price," Conaton said, "we will be ready to buy from them."
Using $510 million for premature production plants won't make it happen for the Air Force. It will simply add those funds to the several-billion-dollar annual biofuel subsidy.
Rolf E. Westgard
St. Paul, Minn.
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