The U.S. military’s interest in developing algae biofuels dates back at least three years, when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began to assess the technical capabilities needed to produce JP-8 grade jet fuel. By the end of 2008, DARPA awarded separate contracts to San Diego’s General Atomics and SAIC, now based in McLean, VA, to make jet fuel from algae and cellulosic feedstocks.
The extent of the Pentagon’s interest became more apparent last week at BIO’s Pacific Rim Summit in Honolulu, according to Biofuels Digest. Editor Jim Lane says the Department of Defense could prove to be the ultimate driver of advanced algae-based biofuels in the United States, “by stepping up as a buyer, and communicating buying signals to the makers of advanced biofuels and their financiers.”
That view was seconded in a weekend column by none other than Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times, who wrote that Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus (a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia) wants to create a “Great Green Fleet” by 2012—a 13-ship carrier battle group powered either by nuclear energy or 50-50 blends of biofuels. Navy aircraft assigned to the fleet would fly on a 50-50 blend of biofuel and conventional fuel.
Friedman adds: “Mabus has also set a goal for the Navy to use alternative energy sources to provide 50 percent of the energy for all its war-fighting ships, planes, vehicles and shore installations by 2020. If the Navy really uses its buying power when buying power, and setting building efficiency standards, it alone could expand the green energy market in a decisive way.”
To meet this goal in 2020, the Navy will need 336 million gallons of drop-in advanced biofuels every year.
Biofuels Digest quotes Chris Tindal, the Navy’s Deputy Director for Renewable Energy, telling the audience in Honolulu: “We need drop-in replacements—we don’t have the time to do engine reconfigurations, so we are working on a series of tests to ensure green strike group certification by 2012 and across our fleet. Which is why we conducted, this past Earth Day, a 1.2 Mach supersonic test of our F-18 Hornet, which we renamed the Green Hornet of course, using camelina-based jet fuel.”
Also quoted is Jason Pyle, founding CEO of San Diego’s Sapphire Energy: “In looking to agriculture to provide the answers, we saw that there are 375 million acres of water-based agriculture. 27 percent of world’s dietary energy comes from rice, and rice is the model system we aspire to.”
The confluence of these two forces, Navy business and algae-based biofuel development, can only enhance San Diego’s emergence as a center for biofuel development.
