http://www.bigislandweekly.com/articles/2010/04/21/read/news/news02.txt
‘Great green fleet’ looks to Big Isle for fuel
The Navy wants land to grow crops for its biofuel to power the next generation military crafts
By Alan D. Mcnarie
Wednesday, April 21, 2010 9:52 AM HST
Hawai’i has long been dependent on imports for nearly all of its fuel and most of its food.
That import-heavy economy has also depended on the U.S. military for cash infusions; in addition to huge amounts of money spent by the armed services for their military bases and personnel here, the state has gotten military budget appropriations for everything from roads to telescopes. Now a new initiative has emerged that may deepen the interrelationship between these three dependencies — for the common good, to maintain federal and state officials.
On April 7, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Defense announced a joint initiative with the state and several private companies to develop biofuel crops in Hawai’i to supply the U.S. Navy. The announcement came in the wake of a day-long biofuel conference attended by such notables as Hawai’i energy czar Ted Peck and Deputy Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan.
Peck told Big Island Weekly that supplying the military with biofuels could potentially double the value of agriculture in the state, and could guarantee big contacts to finance a the state’s nascent biofuel industry.
“That would be $500 million a year that we would be spending anyway, but we would be spending out of the state,” he said.
The initiative was part of a broader federal drive to “green up” the U.S. military, the No. 1 petroleum consumer in the world. The Navy has already tested aircraft that run on mixtures of conventional and biodiesel fuel, is converting many of its destroyers into diesel-electric hybrids and has purchased hundreds of hybrid and electric vehicles for use on land. By 2016, it hopes to float an entire battle group of nuclear, hybrid and biofueled ships, dubbed the “Great Green Fleet.”
Hawai’i is the first state to get some of that initiative money for a biofuel conversion program. Merrigan called the 808 state the “perfect location for growing biomass for the production of advanced biofuels” because of its tropical climate and its “significant naval presence.”
But not everyone is happy with the initiative.
“Instead of growing food to feed the island’s population, we’re going to be growing fuel to feed the military’s war machine,” remarked veteran antiwar activist Jim Albertini, when told of the new agreements. He noted that the military already occupied over 260,000 acres of Hawaiian soil for its bases and training areas, and worried that the biofuel initiative would extend the military’s footprint over thousands of acres of Hawaii’s agricultural lands.
It could also change the face of the Island of Hawai’i. Fuels such as biodiesel and ethanol, produced from plants, have a zero carbon footprint: burning them can contribute no more carbon dioxide to the air than the plants originally get from the air through photosynthesis. But biofuel crops generally require huge acreages to grow, and the armed forces require huge amounts of fuel.
According to the Department of Defense, the Navy alone burns 1.3 billion gallons of fuel per year. As of press time, Pearl Harbor’s environmental officer was unable to tell us how much of that fuel passed through Pearl Harbor. But according to Peck, the U.S. military uses 2 million gallons of jet fuel per year in Hawai’i.
Exactly how many acres would be needed and how many acres would be required to produce that fuel, or even the number of gallons that could be produced per acre, also appear to be unknown: as of press time, no one whom we talked to in the Armed Forces, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, or various biofuel companies could supply those figures.
“We don’t know, today, how much fuel Hawai’i can produce, but we’re not going to know until somebody starts doing it,” said Peck.
One of the most commonly mentioned biofuel crops, jatropha, presents a case in point. Estimates of gallons of fuel per acre from jatropha have varied wildly, from 150 to 2,226, depending on the location and growing conditions. But Hawai’i’s first commercial jatropha plantation, Hawaii Pure Plant Oil in Puna, is not yet in full production; asked what he thought the 250 acre Puna plantation’s yield would be, co-owner Jim Twigg-Smith responded, “We actually haven’t produced a sizable amount so I couldn’t tell you with any accuracy,” though he hoped to “meet or exceed” crop yields in India, where the highest yields had been recorded.
Twigg-Smith said he had not heard about the navy’s initiative and had no contracts with it. But one of the speakers at the April 6 conference, Kelly King of Pacific Biodiesel, cited Pure Plant Oil’s proximity to Hilo when she discussed why her company chose to site its new Big Island biodiesel plant there.
Another possible crop is algae, which is being produced on an experimental scale by a consortium called Cellana at NELHA in North Kona. The U.S. Department of Defense Web site estimates only 500 acres of algae could meet all the Navy’s energy needs. But algae is another technology in its infancy, and claims about production yields are even more widely disputed than those about jatropha. An article in the September/October issue of MotherJones (http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/09/algae-energy-orgy) debunked some of the wilder estimates
“Not one algae company has a commercial-scale system. In fact, most haven’t moved out of the lab…,” the magazine reported. “Promises from companies that say they can surpass 10,000 gallons an acre are ‘total baloney,’ says Ron Pate, a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories.”
The initiative’s possible effects on the state’s efforts to make itself more food-sustainable are also unknown. Biofuel proponents point out that since the demise of sugar, thousands of acres of farmland have lain fallow. But this island has already seen land squabbles erupt between biofuel companies and local ranchers, farmers, and dairymen, after the Department of Land and Natural Resources last year announced a “memoranda of agreement” to two companies that wanted to grow biofuel on up to 22,000 acres of DLNR land.
Jatropha and algae entrepreneurs have argued that their crops don’t have to compete with food crops. Jatropha, for instance, has been touted for its ability to thrive in dry areas such as the scrubland of Ka’u and Kohala. But Hawaii Pure Plant Oil’s 250 acres are growing on former cane and papaya-producing land in rainy Puna.
Peck maintained that algae could also be grown on substandard land such as lava flows; it just has to be level enough for water tanks. And, he says, algae are also a possible food source.
“I ate cookies that were made from algal flour and drank milk that was made from algae products,” he said.
Peck argued that the potential benefits of military biofuel outweighed the drawbacks, if the initiative was managed intelligently.
“We need to be thoughtful about it, to insure that it’s in the best interest of the people of Hawai’i and the land that we love, but it’s a tremendous opportunity for us to pay ourselves,” he maintained.
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