By Carlo Munoz
A scathing review of the Navy’s alternative energy initiatives submitted to Congress this week was riddled with “factual errors” about the service’s ongoing efforts, and lacked any input from senior Navy staff, according to one top service official.
Tom Hicks, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for energy, lambasted the RAND Corporation’s report released yesterday to Congress and the Pentagon on the department’s efforts to develop alternative to petroleum-based fuels.
According to the report, the technology needed to develop the biofuel-based alternatives being pursued by DoD and the service would not be mature enough to produce the quantities sought by the Pentagon.
Further, the department would be better served to focus on energy conservation approaches, such boosting fuel efficiency rates on military vehicles, as a way to cut the department’s dependence on fossil fuels.
However, the lack of Navy input into the report, as well as input from some industry leaders in biofuel development, skewed the findings and presented a woefully inaccurate picture of the service’s ongoing energy plans, Hicks said in a briefing yesterday.
“We think there has been a lack of engagement with [RAND]…and the Secretary of the Navy. We have not been consulted and not provided input into this [report] at the secretariat level,” Hicks said “We feel the authors [also] have not engaged industry in a adequate way, to get a really good sense of what is happening within industry.”
Development of viable energy alternatives was part of Navy Secretary Ray Mabus’ list of the service’s top five priorities announced last October, with the specific goal of having 50 percent of the service’s total fuel consumption drawn from alternative sources.
“We have been very engaged with the alternative fuels industry [and] the players that are in that,” Hicks said during the briefing.
That lack of insight, he added, led to some serious mistakes in the report’s analysis and subsequent conclusions. “There are some misrepresentations [in the report], and we also know there are some factual errors, as it relates to the Navy’s testing and certification efforts,” he said.
Specifically, the RAND report incorrectly stated the Navy was conducting its own testing and certification program for alternative fuels created using the Fischer-Tropsch process, which transitions coal into a liquid fuel source.
“It simply is not true,” Hicks said of the program, noting the sea service has never conducted any kind of testing or certification of Fischer-Tropsch fuel sources, rather focusing on biofuel initiatives. Moreover, the Navy is currently investing millions into developing an algae-based biofuel, and has plans to put the substance through a testing and certification process sometime this year.
Hicks also criticized the report’s overall focus on the department’s pursuit of alternative fuels as a cost-cutting measure, rather than as a national security imperative. “We feel that alternative fuels, and specifically biofuels, play right into those discussions…and that is not properly recognized in this report,” Hicks said.
When asked why RAND officials did not reach out more to the Navy when drafting the report, Hicks said the congressional language in the Fiscal Year 2009 Defense Authorization Act calling for the report did not require Navy or DoD participation.
“My understanding, based on how their [congressional authority] was written, they were not required to solicit comments from DoD, and if any were forthcoming, were not required to act on those,” Hicks said.
However, the Navy energy official questioned why the report’s authors “did not seek any engagement…at any level,” despite the large role the Navy had in regards to alternative energy development within DoD.
But Hicks did note that “there may have been conversations that happened at different levels within the Navy” on the report’s findings, but “certainly not from the policy or strategy perspective that the secretariat could provide.”