From Barracks to the Battlefield - Clean Energy Innovation and America's Armed Forces

Even with sustained improvements in vehicle efficiency efforts, the Department of Defense will rely for the foreseeable future on liquid fuels as its primary energy source. Today, DoD is the largest single consumer of liquid fuels in the world. With uncertainties surrounding the long-term supply and cost of fuels, DoD is complementing vehicle efficiency initiatives with prudent efforts to explore development of alternative fuels. The service branches have set ambitious goals:

• The Air Force wants to use alternative aviation fuels for 50 percent of its domestic aviation needs by 2016.
• The Navy aims to sail the Great Green Fleet and with the Marines plans to use alternative energy sources to meet 50 percent of its energy requirements across operational platforms by 2020.
• The Army seeks to harness alternative fuels to power its vehicle fleet and meet the goal set by Executive Order 13423 to increase non-petroleum fuels by 10 percent annually in non-tactical vehicles
• The biofuels being pursued by military and commercial interests include hydro-treated renewable jet fuel (HRJ) and hydro-processed renewable diesel fuel (HR-D), both of which can be made from the same materials or feedstocks.
• Production-level feedstocks include oil seeds such as camelina, jatropha, rapeseed, soybeans and babassu; animal fats; and plant and cellulosic materials such as crop residue, wood scraps and switchgrass. In the case of oil seeds and animal fats, oil is directly extracted from the feedstock and then refined into the final product. Grasses and crop and forest scraps containing cellulose.
• Emerging feedstocks, currently the focus of a great deal of research, development and pilot projects, include algae, seaweed and electrofuels. Although algae and seaweed produce a relatively large amount of oil per area, they rely on inefficient photosynthesis. Electrofuels are the most advanced nascent biofuel technology being pursued, with the goal of making liquid fuels using organisms that can convert carbon dioxide into fuel-like molecules without using photosynthesis.