Is the Pentagon Serious About Going Green?

(Oct. 14) -- At a lunchtime presentation this week in the Pentagon's courtyard, the director of Army energy policy spoke passionately about the military's commitment to improving energy efficiency as a couple dozen people milled around exhibits. Only a few appeared to be listening.

The public presentation was part of the Pentagon's first-ever energy security forum, which included more than a dozen booths sponsored by companies and military agencies displaying green technologies. Yet the forum raises the question: Is the Pentagon's energy push just eco-friendly window dressing, or part of a serious effort to bring down the U.S. military's massive energy consumption?

By any measure, the Pentagon is a huge energy consumer, making up more than 90 percent of all government fuel consumption. A 2010 report on the military's energy usage found that the Defense Department was spending $3.6 billion on energy for facilities and another $9.6 billion on fuel, such as jet fuel and automobile gasoline.

Yet as a handful of people surveyed the exhibits in the courtyard on that sunny afternoon, the bizarre patchwork of green technologies stood in stark contract to the ambitious goals set by the Pentagon. The Army has pledged to cut its greenhouse emissions by 30 percent; the Navy wants to cut its petroleum use in half by 2015; and the Air Force plans to get 50 percent of its fuel from domestic sources, such as biofuel, by 2016.

The Pentagon also recently swore in Sharon Burke as the first director of the Defense Department's Operational Energy Plans and Programs. Her office is tasked with coming up with an energy strategy blueprint for the Pentagon by the end of the year.

The Pentagon has led the way in pushing renewable and alternative energy. "The Air Force is the largest renewable energy power purchaser in the U.S. and third largest in the world," wrote Sohbet Karbuz, who headed an energy statistics section of the Paris-based International Energy Agency. "Four Air Force bases rely entirely on renewable energy for power, while several others use a combination of solar, wind and land gas production for power."

But the challenge, as Karbuz noted in 2007, is that most of the military energy-efficiency initiatives have been focused on energy consumption in buildings, even though most of the Pentagon's energy consumption is from vehicles and aircraft.

In recent years, however, that has been changing, with a new push for alternative fuel, such as Air Force work on a synthetic fuel that has been tested on a B-52 bomber. Maj. Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, the commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory, points to a host of other projects designed to decrease fuel consumption, from short-term improvements, such as software that allows aircraft to fly more efficiently, to more ambitious projects, such as an engine that dramatically improves propulsion efficiency.

For the military, reducing energy consumption isn't necessarily about going green.

"We focus on energy issues in terms of the enemy threat," Pawlikowski told AOL News in an interview.

That threat was highlighted recently when Pakistan shut down a major supply line for fuel deliveries to Afghanistan, according to Pawlikowski.

"Anything we can do to find technologies that reduce the amount of our energy we use, so that we don't have our supplies lines as vulnerable, helps counter that threat," she said.

"We in the Defense Department have a role to play here -- not solely because we should be good stewards of the environment and our scarce resources, but also because there is a strategic imperative for us to reduce risk, improve efficiencies and preserve our freedom of action whenever we can," Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an audience at the Pentagon earlier that day.

Though one company displayed a hybrid-electric vehicle at the forum, most of the booths focused primarily on small-scale humanitarian projects and novelties, such as a solar panel-activated heating pan that was cooking a chocolate Betty Crocker cake, and a "unisex urine bag." Even Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon's top weapons maker, had a rather modest display featuring its developmental "Stalker" drone, which uses a fuel cell that allows it to fly longer.

There are, of course, more ambitious projects, but whether the Pentagon's efforts are making a dent in energy consumption is hard to say. Gasoline usage for vehicles was down more than 5 percent in 2009 compared with the year prior, the Pentagon's 2010 energy report notes.

Not highlighted in the report, however, was that diesel fuel consumption grew by about 14 percent over that same period.