U.S. Air Force to experiment with chepaer synthetic fueld for planes
The U.S. Air Force consumes more than half of all the fuel consumed by the U.S. government; the service’s 2005 bill for jet fuel exceeded $4.7 billion; now the Air Force has decided to do something about (the Army is participating)
Did you know that half of all the fuel the U.S. government uses each year is consumed by the U.S. Air Force? With the price of iol rising, and with more and more talk about oil being a national security issue, the Air Force is doing something about it. The Air Force has began a series of tests to see whether its fleet of aging B-52 in flight can fly on a blend of traditional crude-oil-based jet fuel with a synthetic liquid made first from natural gas and, eventually, from coal.
Miles-per-gallon fuel efficiency has never been on top of the military’s agendea. The Abrams tank gets less than a mile per gallon, and an F-16 with its afterburners lit up consumes about twenty-eight gallons of fuel per minute. This is changing. “Energy is a national security issue,” Michael Aimone, the Air Force assistant deputy chief of staff for logistics, told the New York Times.
The United States is unlikely ever to become fully independent of foreign oil, Mr. Aimone said, but the intent of the Air Force project is “to develop enough independence to have assured domestic supplies for aviation purposes.”
The Air Force is leading the project, but it is working with the Detroit, Michigan-based Automotive Tank Command of the Army and the Patuxent River, Maryland-based Naval Fuels Laboratory. The initial contract for unconventional fuel for the tests will be signed with Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Syntroleum Corporation. Syntroleum can produce 42 gallons of synthetic fuel from 10,000 cubic feet of natural gas. The raw materials cost about $70. The Syntroleum technology could be used by factories elsewhere to produce the same 42 gallons of fuel from just $10 worth of coal, John Holmes, Syntroleum president, said.
