Green Options

Off they go into the wild green yonder: the 97th Air Mobility Wing at Altus Air Force Base in Oklahoma has just earned the top “Green” rating from the Air Force’s Environmental, Safety and Occupational Health compliance program.

The 97th spent months prepping for its evaluation and earned a “you knocked our socks off” comment from the ESOHCAMP program manager, but that’s not the only sustainability feather in Altus’s cap.  The base is also home to one of the Air Force’s premier green remediation sites.

On this Veterans Day, set aside to honor the sacrifices and contributions of U.S. military veterans, another contribution can be added to the rolls: veterans are playing a strong part in America’s transition away from fossil fuels into a more sustainable, healthful environment and a more secure energy future.

Veterans groups including Operation Free, VoteVets, and an ad hoc group of retired senior military officials are calling for more sustainable fuels and a lower carbon footprint, a position that reflects the Pentagon’s growing urgency to free its high mobility, high tech 21st century warriors from the burden of using fossil fuels that harken back to the days of kerosene lamps and horse drawn buggies.  It also reflects an under-the-radar green metamorphosis in the philosophy of U.S. national defense itself.

The U.S. military has been pushing for the development of alternative fuels for a while now, and nobody paid much attention until the Pentagon finally put a price tag on the oil habit. As reported by Roxana Tiron in thehill.com, last week Pentagon officials disclosed that getting conventional petroleum fuel to remote combat locations in Afghanistan costs a whopping $400 per gallon.

There couldn’t be a more clear illustration of why the “drill baby drill” mentality is a non-sequitur when it comes to energy security.  Regardless of whether petroleum fuels are domestic or imported, they need to be transported to their point of use.  That’s not much of a problem when you’ve got modern seaports, highways and fuel depots, but to paraphrase one infamous former Secretary of Defense, you have to fight the war you have, not the war that’s got the ideal infrastructure to support your fuel of choice.

Underwater surveillance requires a certain supply of persistent power around the coasts, harbors, piers and offshore areas of this nation. Wave energy provides that certainty and reliability because nothing stops the supply chain of power from the roiling sea.

So the US Navy just awarded Lockheed Martin and Ocean Power Technologies a $15 million 4 year contract to provide wave power for terrorism prevention around the coasts. The collaboration holds the promise for finally bringing utility scale wave power to civilian use as well: there’s 2 Terawatts of wave energy potential around the world’s coasts. Twice what the entire world uses now.

The US Air Force has placed an order for 100,000 gallons of Camelina-based jet fuel, in addition to the 40,000 gallons the Navy ordered last month for $2.7 million, with delivery to begin this year. Sustainable Oils is supplying them with a biofuel grown in Montana with 80% lower carbon emissions than jet fuels now.

The US Air Force has ordered an additional 100,000 gallons of Camelina for their second round of flight tests starting next June. The DOD is trying to find a non food-competitive biofuel that can be blended with jetfuel to reduce carbon emissions and is running tests on several kinds of alternative fuels.

In its search for more fuel efficient ways to provide drinking water for long sea voyages and remote bases, the U.S. Navy has developed a second-generation desalination unit that use 65% less energy than conventional technology.  It’s only in the prototype stage but the Navy is already looking beyond seagoing use, and has deployed an earlier version of the technology to provide emergency water supply to disaster areas.

Called the EUWP (Expeditionary Unit Water Purification Program) Gen 2, the new unit also offers a significant secondary benefit that applies to land operations.  By providing an on-site source for potable water, it eliminates the need to run convoys of tanker trucks.  The generators that power the EUWP units still use conventional fuel, but that could change.  If they could be adapted to run cost-effectively on solar power and other sustainable energy, the door is open to desalination on a mass scale.

The U.S. Air Force, which has been soaring into the wild green yonder on alternative fuels and other sustainability measures, has added paint to its roster of more earth-friendly maneuvers.  At Robins Air Force Base in Georgia, the Air Force has been easing away from toxic formulas, using PreKote to protect its aircraft from corrosion.  PreKote is a propriety nontoxic base coating manufactured by Pantheon Chemical of Phoenix, Airizona.

The new coating replaces highly toxic and potentially carcinogenic anti-corrosion products based on chemicals such as hexavalent chromium, which the Department of Defense has targeted for elimination throughout the armed forces, using the force of an urgently worded memorandum issued last spring.

With the help of hometown lithium-ion battery manufacturer International Battery, Allentown PA is on the verge of becoming the latest rust belt refugee to dip its toes into the new green economy.  International Battery has just won a contract with NASA to build a prototype battery strong enough to provide backup power to support the space shuttle program, and it is currently the only U.S. company manufacturing lithium batteries using an earth-friendly water based process instead of organic solvents.

Allentown’s future in sustainable green technology is striking, not only because the city’s manufacturing base was notoriously written off by singer/songwriter Billy Joel a generation ago (”Well we’re living here in Allentown/And they’re closing all the factories down”), but also because the city is a mere hour’s drive away from Centralia PA, one of the world’s most infamous symbols of old school fossil fuels and their devastating consequences.

Waste uranium can apparently be recovered very cheaply from the polluted runoff from uranium mining using E. Coli and a phosphate storage molecule found in seeds, British researchers have found. They used the common bacteria with a chemical parallel of what is already found in agricultural waste: inositol phosphate.

Inositol phosphate is insoluble, so it forms a precipitate on the bacteria. The E. Coli then broke down the precipitate; releasing the phosphate molecules which then attached to uranium molecules to form uranium phosphate, which can then be harvested to recover the uranium.

What they have developed is a way for one contaminant to clean up another.

Hundreds of U.S. military installations have become “islands of protection in seas of development.” The Department of Defense has over 25 million acres of land under its jurisdiction, including key endangered species habitats that are preserved from encroaching civilian development.  More than 300 listed endangered species make a home on U.S. military installations and hundreds of others are [...]

The Seattle-based company Hydrovolts, Inc. has discovered an economical way to tap waterways for hydroelectricity.  Rather than damming mighty rivers or installing turbines in unpredictable oceans, Hydrovolts has aimed its sights on a much smaller target: placid canals and other managed-flow water courses.  Even at low flows, a predictable and reliable current is more than enough to power the company’s unique Flipwing Turbine.  Though small in scale, the simple and relatively affordable turbine could go a long way toward meeting the electrical needs of local communities as well as farms, factories, and other facilities.