U.S. Lawmaker Pleads for Energy Savings

William Matthews, January 14, 2007, Defense News -- It was 2005 when Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., began warning that the world is running out of oil. At the time, petroleum cost $40 a barrel.

Earlier this year, the price hit $100 a barrel, and there are other signs of oil-fired trouble ahead.

China is buying into oil companies around the world, Bartlett told an audience at a conference on energy alternatives for the U.S. military Jan. 9.

“When I asked the State Department why the Chinese are buying up oil around the world, they said the Chinese don’t understand the market system,” Bartlett said. “The Chinese don’t understand the market system,” he repeated as the room filled with grim chuckles.

China also is building a blue-water Navy, Bartlett said. At the rate warships are being built in China and the United States today, it won’t be too many years before China has the larger Navy, said Bartlett, who is the senior Republican on the House seapower and expeditionary forces subcommittee.

Chinese submarines are of particular concern, he said. They could give China control of the Taiwan Strait.

One solution Bartlett and Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., pushed through Congress last year was a requirement that all new large U.S. Navy ships be nuclear-powered.

There are two problems with that: One, the Defense Authorization bill that contains the requirement was vetoed by President George W. Bush because of unrelated language involving Iraq. Bartlett said he is confident the bill will be amended and signed soon.

Two, nuclear-powered ships cost more to build, although less to operate in the long run than conventionally powered ships. Where will the money come from? Bartlett suggests selling a contemporary equivalent of war bonds.

Building nuclear-powered ships is just one step the U.S. military must take. The Army estimates it will need $85 billion to refurbish or replace equipment being worn out or destroyed in Iraq. Don’t do it, Bartlett pleads.

“A refurbished Humvee is still a Humvee” — that is, a fossil-fuel-guzzling battlefield vehicle, he said. “We should be more aggressive and innovative and actively pursue current and near-term technologies” that will reduce oil consumption.
Consider these Bartlett statistics:

Daily fuel consumption per deployed troop in combat has increased from 1.7 gallons during World War II to 27.3 gallons during the second Persian Gulf war.

Fuel accounts for 70 percent of war-fighting logistics supplies by weight. Convoys of tanker trucks are needed to keep combat vehicles, support vehicles and operating base generators running. Protection for fuel convoys diverts troops from combat operations. Convoys create operational vulnerabilities, and reliance on convoys constrains force movement.
Ultimately, in a world with shrinking oil supplies, the United States will probably have to reconsider how it uses its military, Bartlett said. Keeping U.S. troops in 100 countries around the world requires an extraordinary amount of energy, he said.
And it is clear to Bartlett, a medical school professor, inventor, scientist and business owner before entering Congress in 1992, that oil is running out.

“Most of the world’s authorities believe we have discovered 95 percent of the oil that will be discovered,” he said. And recent big discoveries, such as those in Latin America and the Gulf of Mexico, lie beneath miles of ocean and rock and would be enormously difficult and costly to tap.

At best, substitutes for oil, such as ethanol made from corn and other crops or liquefied coal and natural gas, can replace about one-third of today’s oil, Bartlett said.

But they have major drawbacks. The push to make ethanol from corn has already doubled the price of corn on the world market, prompting the United Nations to declare the practice of converting food crops into energy “a crime against humanity,” Bartlett said.

And converting coal to liquid fuel, as the U.S. Air Force is considering, releases twice as much global-warming carbon as burning petroleum-based fuel, he said.

Efforts to produce energy from fusion are about as likely to succeed as playing the lottery. Making oil from tar sands and oil shale consumes more energy than it produces. Hydro, solar, wind, geothermal and ocean energy can help on the margins, he said.

“Conservation is absolutely essential to buy us time” to develop new energy solutions, Bartlett said.

And because of its enormous buying power, the U.S. military “has a huge potential role” in pushing promising solutions, he said. As the nation’s largest single energy consumer, the military can create a market for energy solutions that would otherwise falter for lack of an assured market.