Republicans are questioning the Navy’s alternative-energy efforts as the service cuts back in areas including shipbuilding during austere fiscal times.
House Armed Services Committee (HASC) Readiness subcommittee Chairman Randy Forbes (R-Va.) last week questioned Navy Secretary Ray Mabus’ call for the Navy and Marine Corps to receive half of their energy from non-fossil fuels by 2020. Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member John McCain (R-Ariz.) also recently said the sea service should not be spending $170 million to help create a commercially viable biofuel market along with the departments of Energy and Agriculture (Defense Daily, March 16).
The Navy’s goal of receiving half of its energy from non-fossil fuels has received ample press, and President Barack Obama cited it in his State of the Union address. The fuel must be domestically produced, not require changes in the platforms it powers, and have a price that is competitive with conventional fuels.
Forbes, at the March 29 HASC Readiness hearing, repeatedly asked how the Navy decided on 50 percent.
“Why not 60 percent?” he asked. “Why not 30 percent? Why not 20 percent? Where did the 50 percent come from? How did we get that?”
Jackalyne Pfannenstiel, assistant secretary of the Navy for energy, installations, and environment, maintained “50 percent is both enormously aggressive and in our view is achievable.”
She acknowledged not knowing exactly how the 50-percent goal was determined.
“It was a number that was thought to be and estimated to be achievable but truly a stretch goal,” she said. “We knew how many gallons, how many barrels of alternative fuel we would need and can we get there…. Could it have been 55 percent or 45 percent or 60 percent or 40 percent? I suppose it could have been.”
Forbes jumped on Pfannenstiel’s description of the 50 percent non-fossil-fuel target as a “stretch goal” that is “not easily attainable but is reasonably attainable.”
The congressman asked if there is “any independently verifiable study that says 50 percent is the amount we should have and that we will attain that by 2020.” Pfannenstiel said she does not know of a study stating the 50-percent figure is the amount that is absolutely needed. However, she pointed to a recent report by LMI, a nonprofit organization, that states the 50-percent goal is attainable.
She further told Forbes she would get back to him on his question about any analysis conducted to derive the 50 percent target.
Forbes lamented that “we don’t know where (Mabus) came up with 50 percent, if he did it on the way to work one day, if he did it talking around the water fountain or if there’s a study.”
“If there’s an independently verifiable study, I need to see it,” he said.
Forbes, a proponent of building more Navy ships, lamented that the service has scaled back its goal of building up to ta 313-ship fleet to one with 300 vessels.
“I’m just looking at the Navy and saying why in the world, if we’re going to have a stretch goal on alternative energy, shouldn’t we have a stretch goal in ship building,” he said.
The Defense Department, meanwhile, has set an overall goal of reducing energy intensity by 30 percent by 2015 and 37.5 percent by 2020.
For FY ’13 the Pentagon is seeking $1.4 billion for initiatives to improve its operational energy use.
Sharon Burke, assistant secretary of defense for operational energy, told the HASC subcommittee that roughly 90 percent of that budget request is for initiatives that reduce the Pentagon’s demand for energy.
“That’s very important because we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan that with distributed operations, asymmetric threats and attacks and modern military capabilities that are terrific but also very fuel intensive, very energy intensive that we need a great deal of fuel,” she said. “And our supply line has been vulnerable.”
She said “the opportunity cost in lives and in dollars and in capability has been much too high,” and officials believes these concerns will remains “as we project presence and power elsewhere in the world, particularly in a time when there’s an increasing prevalence of precision-guided munitions.”
Burke said the other 10 percent of the Pentagon’s $1.4 billion operational-energy budget request is for supply diversification.
“This means we want better energy options that serve the mission,” she said. “So for example, we’ve been using solar in Afghanistan for our forces who are out at the tactical edge. This gives them better range, endurance, resilience, independence from the supply line. It helps them do their jobs.”
Burke said her office is working on “setting a coherent and consistent policy for the department on the use of alternative” liquid fuels.