YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE, Japan — Hundreds of veterans, about two dozen former flag officers and several senators threw their support behind Defense Department efforts to adopt alternative fuel sources.
The senators said they believed they could defeat the amendment barring alternative-fuel spending, which passed by one vote in the Senate Armed Services Committee in June.
“We have bipartisan support to undo the work of the committee,” said Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), according to Reuters.
Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) co-wrote a June 15 editorial for Politico stating their intentions to roll back the amendment. “The Defense Department, as the federal government’s largest energy consumer, has a clear interest in weaning itself off foreign oil,” they wrote. “We hope to correct that short-sighted mistake when the bill reaches the Senate floor.”
According to Politico, the amendments passed 13-12 during a closed-door markup in part, because Collins was absent during the votes because she had to monitor a fire aboard the USS Miami, the nuclear-powered submarine that was docked at a Maine shipyard.
“Much to my surprise, the vote was called while I was gone,” Collins said. “My position is clear that I’m in favor of biofuels.”
Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich), the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, also voiced his support for changing the bill’s language prior to a floor vote, the Reuters story said.
A letter of support for the alternative fuels was written to Congress and President Barack Obama this week and included signatures from former Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner and retired Gen. Anthony Zinni. It comes as lawmakers prepare to clash over the amendments in the 2013 defense bills that would effectively scuttle the Navy’s plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on alternative fuels.
“The U.S. national security network is doing its part to break the military from the tether of imported oil, reduce mission performance risks, deny income to regimes hostile to America’s interests, and strengthen our economy and ensure that scarce budgetary resources are maximized,” read the letter, which was sponsored by the Pew Project on National Security, Energy and Climate.
Warner and others have been traveling to military bases across the country in recent months to drum up support for biofuels spending, which congressional opponents have attacked as unnecessary and wasteful.
Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus has championed the use of biofuels as one of his highest priorities since taking office in 2009, repeatedly stating that the service cannot depend entirely upon volatile global oil supplies and prices.
However, biofuel opponents scored a victory last week when the House passed an appropriations bill that eliminated a $70 million request for the construction of biofuel plants and refineries.
“While the Committee is supportive of alternative energy development, in these times of decreasing budgets, it does not seem prudent to stockpile funds so far ahead of need,” the House appropriations bill stated.
The Senate will likely delay its vote on the bill. The House has passed seven appropriations measures this year, while the Senate has not yet passed any, according to The Associated Press.
A much bigger fight over the future of alternative fuels will come later this year, when the National Defense Authorization Act comes to a floor vote in the Senate.
The passed House version and the pending Senate version of the authorization act both contain amendments that would effectively end alternative fuel spending by barring the Defense Department from buying fuel that costs more than “traditional fossil fuel.”
Although Mabus and other supporters say that alternative fuel costs will go down as volume increases and the industry develops, current prices are much higher.
At nearly $27 per gallon, the biofuel purchased for a demonstration of the “Great Green Fleet” in Hawaii this month cost roughly eight times as much as conventional fuel, according to service figures.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and other lawmakers in the House and Senate blasted the demonstration’s cost during committee hearings earlier this year, and said they saw little to suggest that alternative fuel would ever be cost-competitive with oil and gas.
Opponents have also cited studies that question whether some types of alternative fuels would damage military equipment.
Despite the congressional pushback, Mabus told Stars and Stripes on July 16 that he had no immediate plans to change his goals: a carrier strike group powered with half biofuels by 2016, and 50 percent of all Navy fuel coming from alternative sources by 2020.
“I know we’ve got a lot of support in Congress,” Mabus said during a visit to Yokosuka Naval Base.
Should the amendments barring alternative fuel purchases pass in one version of the bill but be changed or deleted in the other, it would be up to a conference committee to reconcile the dueling House and Senate versions.
(c)2012 Stars and Stripes
Distributed by MCT Information Services
So bofuels will cost the military 8 times the cost of regular fuel in the time of tight budgets its just wrong
This is the crap that the Government wants to spend money on. Money from TAXES. Raise the taxes on the rich, so we can have a “green fleet”. We need to get rid of these clowns ASAP, or there will be no country for the “green fleet” to defend.
Instead of Arab terrorist supporting oil ?
Why do want to our Navy dependent on our enemies ?
The sources of crude include many more nations than “Arab terrorists”. Among them is the US itself. Biofuel supplementation may eventually work out but production plus distribution problems make it no where near cost effective for the armed forces.
Show me the numbers.
I know them it is an exercise for your own education.
The Navy, being honest seaman, dealing with the reality of the sea, constantly, and perhaps being nearer to God than thee, plans for the real future, not your conservative political mythology.
Predicting the results of one’s current actions relative to your future survival
is call navigation by the men who go down to the sea.
Who are you to question the US Navy’s critical navigational and engineering
decisions, sir ?
Many great navy’s used wind at their backs and the stars in the sky for critical navigation and they steered a true and steady course before headin’ off to the Fiddlers Green. Arrr!
Well, I worry it might come to that again, actually.
Given that the US Navy started on the Piscaticus River, once already, I’d be right proud of New England leading the way so we Yankees could maintain a civilization that could still could send ships out manned by good Yankee sailors, no matter what on the international. one world economy, brings to rest of the world.
Like those poor Chinamen.
I’d love to hear the marine engineers, who always took such good care of me as to always make port and who now have loverly shore jobs on those land based wind powered electric generation plants
tell at least those of us who can understand them just how well they really work.
It strikes me, that just as the one eyed man is king in the land of the blind, that having locally produced power built before the company collapsed and it was still giving us quality bottoms , is a wise thing for our grandchildren.
It is fundamental that those in know just stand and report.
Currently, the problem is that biased landsman controlling the information so how can the traditionally progressive Yankee seaman speak the truth to our landsman friends, as we have always done here in Maine ?
Best to know your enemy and that poster above is not one of them. Sometimes it takes time to know a good man.
Ahhhh, but why don’t you think I’m on your side ?
Read it again with an unconventual mind set, Popeye.
As to how much time it takes , how much do we have on the Net, Chief ?
Yes I figured you where as a traditionally progressive Yankee seaman, I wasn’t referring to myself.
MMA class of ’69 BS marine engineering and now a landlubber
where did you get all that dribble… ? I have standing… do you ? if so .. show it
The flag ship I was on always planned to hit
Mardi Gras for a week or so…lol
The US has more oil than Saudi Arabia. Our own GOVERNMENT prevents us from getting it.
Where the heck do you get that statistic? Everything I’ve seen puts Saudi Arabia 2nd and the US 13th or 14th in oil reserves. We’re the leading refiner of gasoline, but you need oil to make gas.
Which says nothing about the fact that depending strictly on fossil fuels as an energy source is a dead-end strategy. Fossil fuels are finite, and will only become more expensive as they become more limited. Also that our GOVERNMENT, to use your terminology, has been responsible for financing some of the most productive research the world has seen.
For crying out loud, the short-sightedness and panicky reactions of some people is ridiculous.
“For crying out loud, the short-sightedness and panicky reactions of some people is ridiculous. “How does your reaction justify $27/gallon fuel? Stop drinking the Kool-aid!
McCain the rest of the GOP oil addict’s are crying ’cause they know that the end of the line is in sight. 4 years ago the Air Force, at Edwards AFB in California, ran a test on a B-52 (and that plane set’s the standard for the term fuel hog !) by running 2 of it’s 8 engines on a synthetic fuel. Why the Air Force didn’t release the result’s is a mystery but that the B-52, that normally fly’s on JP-8, flew at all on the synthetic fuel makes the arguement. And as far as not being cost competitive, even McCain knows that fuel is a commodity and as such comes down in both production and cost price as it’s made in commensurate volume. That Collins has seen this, since one big part of the synthetic’s is a bio-fuel made from ‘ag’ waste, like ‘tater skin’s, is to her credit. That the rest of the GOP is refusing just shows how far they’ll go to kowtow to their corporate campaign contributor’s, even to the point of jepordizing the Nation’s security and energy policy. And these are the same corporate campaign contributor’s that are tossing truckload’s of money at Romney. Gee, is there a link here ? Someone needs to ask McCain that, on camera and for the record.
no matter what Susan Collings says.. it falls on deaf ears… she is the perfect RHINO and is an insult to the democratic process…
The Republican party has been bought and paid for by multi-national oil companies and Saudi royalty for decades, and that’s why when the GOP is in charge, we send our men and women of the military off to fight in Mideast wars that benefit those clients. The Saudis wanted Saddam out of the picture, they snapped their fingers and we jumped. Now the Saudis want us to take out their religious foes in Iran and that’s Job One on Romney’s agenda, if elected, thanks to his neocon foreign policies advisors who are all retreads from the Bush/Cheney years.
As for research on alternative fuels for the military, remember that similar research in the 1930s into substitutes for rubber came in real handy when Japan cut off the supplies of natural rubber. By 1945, America was producing synthetic rubber at twice the total tonnage of the world’s pre-war supply of natural rubber.
There’s no limit to American ingenuity. Republicans want to keep us in our dead-end addiction to foreign oil because that’s where they get their money.
As a person who drove JP4 fuel tankers while in the military I applaud anything that will reduce the risk to our troops and make our military less dependent on our enemies for fuel.
Those politicians who want us to remain dependent on middle eastern oil should be forced to serve a few tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If the U.S. Military supplemented their internal combustion engines with Hydrogen they would be saving over a third of their fuel cost. 1000’s of civilians across the country are converting their cars over to H2 fuel and saving an unspeakable amount of $ per year. Put a leash on Big Oil and convert your car, truck, suv or boat today! http://www.hydroclubusa.com/360.html