Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future. Amanda Little

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СКАЧАТЬ save fuel while the vehicle idles. Similarly, efforts to develop hybrid engines for tanks and Humvees have been tabled due to funding shortages.

      TRUE COST

      What would it take to get the funding and political capital necessary to significantly ratchet down the military’s energy footprint? To find out, I went to speak with Al Shaffer, the executive director of the Pentagon’s Energy Task Force. Shaffer has a big-picture handle on all the moving parts of the Pentagon—not just the army, navy, and air force, but also the dozens of other divisions that handle logistics, long-term strategy, and, most important, budget.

      Shaffer’s office was cheery and bright, with a map of the world spanning an entire wall, mementos from his travels decorating the windowsills and bookshelves, and, at the center of his conference table, a bowl of pretzels, a “swear jar” charging himself and his colleagues one dollar for every bad word uttered, and a menagerie of state-of-the-art engine parts.

      Affable, lanky, and energetic, Shaffer looked more like a TV anchor than a career soldier, with tousled Anderson Cooper–style silver hair and an oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He joined the air force at the age of twenty-one while a student at the University of Vermont, and “quickly realized it was kinda neat to play GI Joe and have a mission and a purpose in my life.” Shaffer trained as a meteorologist to supply weather information to frontline combat units. He spent twenty-four years in the Armed Forces before retiring and joining the Department of Defense. He formed the Pentagon’s Energy Security Task Force in 2006 in response to the spike in fuel prices after Hurricane Katrina. “All of a sudden we realized we had a problem at the Defense Department,” Shaffer told me, “because a $10 increase in the price of crude resulted in a $1.4 billion upsurge in our operating costs for the next year.” These cost surges arrived like an exclamation point just weeks after Zilmer’s urgent memo, heightening the focus within the DoD on a shift toward leaner, greener energy strategies.

      Shaffer emphasized the progress the military has made installing renewable energy on its bases. “Did you know that the world’s largest photovoltaic farm is on an air force base?” he asked, adding that the DoD currently derives 12 percent of the electricity for its facilities from renewable sources—making it one of the world’s largest consumers of green energy. The agency has vowed to increase that to 25 percent by 2025, and reduce the energy usage of its facilities 30 percent by 2015. Shaffer noted the growth in the military’s green R & D efforts to push the development of efficient and renewable technologies. “This is my favorite,” he said, snatching up one of the exhibited engine parts. It was a standard piston with a low-friction nickel-boron coating that eliminates the need for lubricating oil and improves efficiency, power, and torque by 25 percent, he said, “for a total cost of about $250. It’s not ready yet for the mass market, but it’s close.”

      All of this sounded promising, but I asked Shaffer how the U.S. military can talk about a secure energy future when its own B-52 bomber uses up to 45,000 gallons of fuel in a single mission. And as the Defense Science Board’s 2001 More Capable Warfighting Through Reduced Fuel Burden report stated clearly, fuel usage is not something the military can actually restrict: “Because DOD’s consumption of oil represents the highest priority of all uses, there will be no fundamental limits to DOD’s fuel supply for many, many decades.”

      Shaffer nodded slowly, indicating he understood this problem all too well. “Energy security is critically important—and it has become dramatically more so in recent years because of the increase in cost of oil. This is scary.” He paused. “Our cost for energy went up just shy of $3 billion from fiscal year 2005 to fiscal year 2006, even though we reduced our overall usage of energy by about 5 percent during that same time period.” Shaffer stressed how sudden this spike in fuel prices had been: from early 2005 to their peak in 2008, oil prices almost quadrupled, from roughly $35 a barrel to nearly $140 a barrel. Despite recent price fluctuations, oil prices in the long run will almost certainly rise, Shaffer acknowledged. “This is an enduring challenge—it’s not going away.”

      The shift to a greener and more efficient military, said Shaffer, will accelerate as the Pentagon adjusts to volatile oil prices and rethinks the way its fuel costs are calculated. The Defense Science Board report pointed out that the Pentagon calculates the cost of the fuel it uses according to wholesale refinery price—roughly the price we pay at the pump—and does not factor in the cost of delivery in the field of combat. DSB analysis showed that the total cost of fuel when delivered to army bases over short distances is roughly $10 per gallon. That number quadruples over long distances to “at least $40–$50 per gallon” and rockets up to “more than $400 per gallon” when fuel is delivered by aerial tankers to aircraft in flight. “This produces a sub-optimal allocation of resources,” the report concluded.

      These kinds of added costs are particularly pronounced in the Iraq operation given that a pipeline infrastructure can’t be used, and given how dispersed the combat activity is—concentrated attacks are cheaper and more efficient. “The war on terrorism is a lot like guerrilla warfare,” explained Shaffer. “When we send out a convoy, there are vehicles in front of the fuel trucks, there are vehicles behind the fuel trucks, and there are aircraft flying overhead. It’s very, very complex. Takes a lot of kids, a lot of our young troops. Every time they go out and do this type of run, it puts their lives in danger.”

      Once the Pentagon starts factoring in the true cost of fuel, it makes the new renewable energy alternatives look cheaper by comparison. “We don’t do things to be green,” Shaffer told me. “We do things for operational efficiency, for improving our capability to perform our mission, whatever that mission may be. And it just so happens that being sustainable is now a smart thing to do.” Historically, the Pentagon was built to be effective, not efficient. So long as oil was cheap and easy to distribute, an energy-guzzling military was just as effective as an energy-efficient military. As Shaffer pointed out, not since World War II—when the Germans were bombing American oil tankers and interrupting the Allies’ fuel supply routes—has the Pentagon had to worry about having affordable and abundant energy to buoy its military operations. Now the picture is changing radically.

      “Suddenly efficiency presents us with multiple benefits,” Shaffer told me. “We save money; we simplify our logistics supply line, which makes us a more effective fighting force; we free ourselves from dependence on oil controlled by our adversaries; and above all we save lives. With better energy conservation, we simply would not have as many combat casualties.”

      In March 2008, the Defense Science Board publicly released a report titled More Fight—Less Fuel. This report reiterated many of the requests it had made in its 2001 document and berated the Pentagon for failing to implement these recommendations in a meaningful way. Though it praised initiatives like those of Nolan and Shaffer, it exposed the underfunding that plagued such programs. (Although the Pentagon’s budget for alternative-energy development rose from $400 million in 2006 to $1.2 billion in 2009, that’s still a tiny fraction of its R & D spending.) This sequel report quoted one general’s emphatic plea to “unleash us from the tether of fuel.”

      THE PATRIOT

      James Woolsey, the former chief of the Central Intelligence Agency under the Clinton administration, lives in a rambling farmhouse in rural Maryland. I arranged to meet with Woolsey after my Pentagon visit in the hope of getting a wider perspective on the marriage of war and oil. Woolsey is in many ways a consummate Washington insider—someone who served as one of the voices in the room when key decisions were made about America’s foreign policy in the Middle East. But since he left the CIA he has become a twenty-first-century Paul Revere, warning the public of the national security threats posed by America’s dependence on foreign fuel.

      A dry-witted, sharp-featured brainiac who was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and got his law degree at Yale, Woolsey, now СКАЧАТЬ