Panel Addresses Military Energy Initiatives, Vulnerabilities

By PETER ATKINSON, Deputy Editor

Efficiency, conservation, alternative fuels and the need for the sea services to ween themselves from fossil fuels and energy from volatile or vulnerable sources were emphasized by service and defense officials and energy experts during the “Energy: The Next Wave” seminar May 4 at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space Exposition.

To put the situation in context, Alan R. Shaffer, principal deputy director, defense, research and engineering at the Department of Defense (DoD), who also is acting director of operational energy plans and programs, noted that the DoD is the single largest consumer of oil and energy in the United States.

“About 1.5 percent of the total energy consumed in the United States is by the DoD. The DoD consumes about the same amount of energy in oil as all of our airline carriers combined,” he said.

The DoD’s oil bill in 2008 was $20 billion, Shaffer said, adding, “more important than the money is the operational cost of energy and inefficiency. About 70 percent of the convoy traffic in Afghanistan is to carry oil and water to the forward bases. That presents a very soft target.”

To address these concerns, Shaffer said a Draft Energy Security Plan “has been kicking around the department a while” and outlined its overarching goals: maintaining or enhancing operational effectiveness by reducing total energy force demands, increasing energy strategic resilience by developing alternative or assured fuel supplies, upgrading business processes and establishing and monitoring defense-wide energy metrics.

“We need to think about energy in terms of force planning assumptions, in terms of requirements development, in terms of how do we buy platforms that will have a lower energy demand in the future, in terms of technology and in terms of the overall culture of the department,” he said.

Jackalyne Pfannenstiel, assistant secretary of the Navy, Energy, Installations and Environment, and Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert, vice chief of naval operations, spoke of the service’s well-documented energy initiatives and goals, which have been articulated in a strategy Navy Secretary Ray Mabus issued in October.

They pointed to solar-power arrays and geo-thermal plants used to help power installations such as Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, Calif.; the F/A-18 Super Hornet that flew recently on a mixture of fuel and bio-fuel; ship innovations such as new hull and propeller coatings and stern flaps that decrease drag, and the amphibious assault ship USS Makin Island’s all-electric auxiliary power system; and better technology to improve the efficiency of nuclear power plants in carriers and submarines; as just some measures the Navy and Marine Corps have taken.

“The Department of the Navy intends to be riding the next wave of energy innovation,” said Pfannenstiel, whose job title had “Energy” added to it when she came onboard in March. “We are going to be the leader in energy and we’ve already started.”

However, she noted, renewable energy and alternative fuels are only part of the solution.

“We need to create a long-term sustainable culture of energy awareness and activism among our Sailors and Marines,” she said.

Promoting energy efficiency and pursuing innovation are also part of that equation, Pfannenstiel said, along with a third element, which she described as the most difficult, changing behaviors.

“This is the key, without succeeding at this, without capturing the hearts and minds, none of our other accomplishments are sustainable in the long term. These are really ambitious goals. ... We see these as absolutely achievable goals. ... Our Sailors and Marines have always been leaders and will continue to be so in energy. We know that we’re doing the right thing for our department, our country and our planet.”

R. James Woolsey Jr., a foreign policy expert, former director of the CIA and now a partner with VantagePoint Venture Partners, offered a sober assessment of the threats and vulnerabilities the services face if they do not achieve those goals and reduce their appetite for traditional sources of energy.

He focused first on the electrical grid, both here and aboard, and its vulnerability to cyber attack and physical attack.

“All military bases, as far as I’m aware, except China Lake, which has its own geo-thermal system, are now essentially on the grid. The civilian vulnerability on the grid is also the military’s vulnerability. If the grid goes, you are back in the late 19th century. You are in terrible shape.

“We have to do a much better job working to make sure that powering critical installation assets can be accomplished by locally generated power ... and to do it in such a way that by doing a triage on all of our military facilities we can find ways to get along without some of our energy and electricity during a crisis. But we also have to be able to use what we can use in such a way that we make it possible to accomplish our mission even if the grid is out for a substantial period of time.”

The military’s dependence on oil puts it in an equally precarious situation, which Woolsey argued was being made even worse by the fact that much of the oil being used to power the military to help fight terrorism is being supplied by nations where many of these terrorists “learn the kind of hatred that puts us at risk. Paying for both sides of a war is not a very sound strategy,” he said.

One of the consequences of oil dependence is being played out at the moment in the Gulf of Mexico, where the Deepwater Horizon oil well, which exploded and then sank in water approximately 5,000 feet deep in late April and has been leaking oil into the gulf ever since, has the potential to create an unprecedented environmental and economic disaster, said Vice Adm. David P. Pekoske, vice commandant of the Coast Guard.

“You’ll hear some discussion about whether the flow is 1,000 barrels a day or 5,000 barrels a day,” he said. “Quite frankly, that doesn’t make a lot of difference in the whole scheme of things because the potential, if this well head blows, is over 100,000 barrels a day. We’re worried about a larger release that’s certainly a potential.”

Thus far, BP, the leasee of the well, has been unable to activate a blowout preventer to shut off the flow of oil, which is coming from three separate leaks and had reached the shoreline along the Louisiana coast for the first time earlier that day, Pekoske said.

He noted that several simultaneous efforts were being undertaken by BP to mitigate the leaks. Along with trying to activate the blowout preventer, the company was putting together a coffer dam system to collect the oil as it’s coming out of the well and funnel it to the surface where it can be collected. It also was drilling a relief well. But none of these potential fixes are likely to stem the flow of oil any time soon.

“Keep your fingers crossed because this is incredibly significant,” Pekoske said, “significant for the people in the region not just from an economic perspective but from a livelihood perspective because this is their livelihood and they are rightfully very, very concerned about that.”