The Great Green Vanity Project

When does a personal vanity project become policy? Simple, when you have the power to do so and the top-cover to let you have your way.

That is all you really need to know about how SECNAV Mabus got his farcical “Great Green Fleet” – a topic we’ve covered here over the years.

In the September issue of USNI’s Proceedings, Marc Cancian brings the whole sordid mess back in to view, stake and hammer in hand,

In 2011, then-Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced an initiative called the Great Green Fleet. Although wrapped in the mantle of warfighting, it was never really about the Navy. Instead, it was about pursuing a national energy agenda and using military money to create a biofuel industry. The Great Green Fleet became part of a broader set of initiatives designed to put the Navy on the front lines of the fight against climate change.

...and why not. It is only money;

The Great Green Fleet was the most egregious element of the former secretary’s energy initiatives. Biofuels—making fuel from biological matter rather than pumping it from the ground—were thought to be more environmentally friendly and a way to reduce dependence on foreign oil. The administration committed to a half-billion-dollar initiative to jump-start the industry, of which the Navy was responsible for $150 million.

How much depot level maintenance in WESTPAC would that have supported? Well, not as much press time and infinitely less virtue to signal - but priorities, Shipmate;

Although wrapped in the mantle of warfighting, it was never really about the Navy. Instead, it was about pursuing a national energy agenda and using military money to create a biofuel industry. The Great Green Fleet became part of a broader set of initiatives designed to put the Navy on the front lines of the fight against climate change. Although superficially plausible at the time when fuel prices were high, the Green Fleet is inappropriate, even counterproductive, at a time of booming U.S. energy production and Navy budget shortfalls. It is time to take a critical look at these energy initiatives, terminate those that do not directly help the Navy, subject others to cost-benefit analysis, but also look broadly at places where additional energy investments might help the Navy.
...
Creating new fuel sources was never necessary, but it is ludicrous now. Fracking and other technologies have skyrocketed U.S. production of oil and natural gas. The U.S. Energy Information Agency expects the United States to produce more crude oil in 2018 (9.9 million barrels per day) than it ever has in its history. The United States is now the largest hydrocarbon producer in the world, surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia, having increased its production by 50 percent in the last decade. Global oil prices have plummeted, from $140 per barrel to about $50 per barrel.

Make sure to read it all, and I like his recommendations at the end; Terminate, Review, Continue, Examine, & Drop.

SECNAV, When You've Lost ViceNews ....

This sad little vanity project is well known to the folks here on the Front Porch, but it appears that the smell could not be contained.

As reported by Justin Rohrlich at Vice;

In an October 2009 speech at the Naval Energy Forum, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, who had taken over the post six months before, unveiled five energy targets he wanted the Navy to hit over the course of the following decade.

"Energy reform is a strategic imperative," he said.

One of the targets involved the deployment, by 2016, of what he called the Great Green Fleet, a carrier strike group "composed of nuclear ships, surface combatants equipped with hybrid electric alternative power systems running biofuel, and aircraft flying only [on] biofuels."

Three years later, following a vicious battle with Republican legislators over the initiative, a 50/50 blend of chicken fat and conventional petroleum successfully powered two destroyers and a cruiser for two days during a month-long warfare exercise in Hawaii. The feat required 450,000 gallons of biofuel at a cost of $12 million;

We should all give credit to Rep. Duncan Hunter The Younger (R-CA) for his clarity on this topic;

For 2016, the Navy has purchased just under 80 million gallons of the 10/90 biofuel blend, about 6 percent of the 1.3 billion gallons of fuel the Navy uses annually. The Navy paid $2.05 per gallon, which is roughly in line with the cost of regular marine diesel thanks to robust biofuel subsidies from the US government, though that hasn't satisfied the program's detractors.

"There's more important shit to spend money on in the military, period," says US Representative Duncan Hunter, a Marine Corps veteran and Republican congressman from San Diego, principal homeport of the Navy's Pacific Fleet.

He describes the decision-makers behind the Great Green Fleet as "all the smartest guys that went to the John F. Kennedy School of Smart People," and calls their interest in biofuels "just stupid."

This adds no value to our Navy and actually is counter-productive;

A recent analysis by Transport & Environment, a European conservation group, found that biodiesel made from palm oil leads to three times the overall CO2 emissions of regular petroleum-based diesel. Therefore the biofuel the Navy took on in the Mediterranean earlier this year arguably enlarged its carbon footprint.
…
"The Department of Energy is investing a lot of money into algae-based fuels, which are promising, but often the greenest fuels are also the most expensive ones," says Emily Cassidy, a research analyst at the Washington, DC-based Environmental Working Group.

The Navy has paid as much as $424 a gallon for algae-based biofuel in the past…
…
Biofuels need to be created from something, and according to a report released last year by the nonpartisan World Resources Institute, a Washington, DC-based research group, meeting 20 percent of global energy demand using plant-based biofuels by 2050 "would require humanity to at least double the world's annual harvest of plant material in all its forms.... Therefore, the quest for bioenergy at a meaningful scale is both unrealistic and unsustainable."

In the end, this isn’t just a wasteful vanity project by the SECNAV, but embarrassing for all the good people whose professional lives are impacted by supporting it.

Somerville says that "the Navy is essentially doing, well, I don't really know what they're doing. I suppose they're making a statement that they want renewables."

Hunter's take is that a "green [Navy] sounds great to a large part of the population that votes a specific way."

And Heinberg says it's due to nothing short of an existential crisis.

"[Navy officials] see the future of oil as bleak, and without oil, how do they stay in business? There is no real answer," he says. "They've got to grasp at some straw or another, and this is the one that's nearest.... But just because people need something doesn't mean it exists."

What a boondoggle.

SECNAV, UN is on the Line ....

When the UN goes Salamander on you - you know that you're in an isolated position;

The United Nations will officially warn that growing crops to make “green” biofuel harms the environment and drives up food prices, The Telegraph can disclose. 

A leaked draft of a UN report condemns the widespread use of biofuels made from crops as a replacement for petrol and diesel. It says that biofuels, rather than combating the effects of global warming, could make them worse.

The draft report represents a dramatic about-turn for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Its previous assessment on climate change, in 2007, was widely condemned by environmentalists for giving the green light to large-scale biofuel production. The latest report instead puts pressure on world leaders to scrap policies promoting the use of biofuel for transport.

The summary for policymakers states: “Increasing bioenergy crop cultivation poses risks to ecosystems and biodiversity.”

Again, this pet vanity project of the Great Green Fleet beyond experimentation is a waste of money and personality based folly in the extreme.

Most of the time, hard critique is not out of malice, but out of heartbreak. Let's not speak of this anymore, m'kay? 

Our Navy needs the SECNAV's attention elsewhere from here on out - mostly about tomorrow's post.

Hat tip IK.

The Things Books & Careers Are Made Of

Somewhere out there is a young investigative report who doesn't know it right now, but they are going to make a career on this story if they are a good writer and are willing to dig hard and deep. In a year, in five - who knows; but someone will write it.

It is really a nice slow pitch. I wonder who will swing at it?

Connect these two dots.

Dot 1:

The U.S. is on track to reach records for crude-oil production by 2016, as hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling techniques continue to unlock oil in shale rock.

The renaissance in the oil sector feeds into the debate of whether the U.S. should allow crude oil to be exported freely. The U.S. has kept a lid on oil exports since 1973, when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries stopped selling crude to the U.S. in retaliation for its support of Israel in a war with Egypt and Syria.

The rising U.S. production "will weigh heavily on oil prices," said Ed Morse, head of commodity research at Citigroup. C -0.41% He said he believes that in the second half of the decade the global benchmark price will be $15 a barrel below where it is now.

Dot 2:

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus have announced that the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Navy’s joint Farm-to-Fleet venture will now make biofuel blends part of regular, operational fuel purchase and use by the military.
...
“A secure, domestically-produced energy source is very important to our national security,” said Navy Secretary Mabus. “Energy is how our naval forces are able to provide presence around the world. Energy is what gets them there and keeps them there. The Farm-to-Fleet initiative we are announcing today is important to advancing a commercial market for advanced biofuel, which will give us an alternative fuel source and help lessen our dependence on foreign oil.”
...
Preliminary indications from the Defense Production Act Title III Advanced Drop-in Biofuels Production Project are that drop-in biofuels will be available for less than $4 per gallon by 2016, making them competitive with traditional sources of fuel.

Government run industrial planning. What a great and glorious economic track record that has. I have a flex-fuel truck; forget about the higher price, you will have significant range reductions to go with it. Just what a military needs in the INDO-PAC, shorter ranges. Buy hey, let's not let real Tactical, Operational, or Strategic considerations come in to play - much less budgetary challenges. We'll just cut pay and benefits to support the corn industry.

That isn't the story though. Hey, at least we don't have money and powerful business with the ability to lobby and push this issue for financial gain. Ahem.

Ideology and personal agenda folded in everything from ADM lobbyist to farm-state politics. There is your future - all you have to do is keep pulling strings.

All those who think the most important thing for the US Navy in the next decade and a half is biofuel, please raise your hand. Those who do not have your hands raised, answer this question for me then; why?.

Gaggley Green Gobbledegook

The blessings of technology and geography have us heading in the direction of more oil production than Saudi Arabia inside of 7 years.

Our defense budget groans under the stress of recapitalizing after a decade of war, cuts & sequestration ... and yet - there is always time for vanity projects, it seems.

Solar instead of batteries, good idea ... but ....

The Pentagon increasingly sees this energy dependence as a military weakness and is trying to reduce it. The Navy is attempting to transition to biofuels for its ships and planes, and the Army and Marine Corps are exploring a host of initiatives, including using solar energy to power radio batteries.

"Every time some yahoo says 'I'm going to close the Strait of Hormuz' (the price of) oil spikes," Navy Secretary Ray Mabus told USA TODAY in an interview.

In the past, Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world's oil supply travels.

"Right now, we buy our oil from foreign sources, and some of those sources don't have our best interest at heart," Mabus said.

OK, let's check a few facts, shall we?

The United States relied on net imports (imports minus exports) for about 45% of the petroleum (crude oil and petroleum products) that we consumed in 2011. Just over half of these imports came from the Western Hemisphere. Our dependence on foreign petroleum has declined since peaking in 2005.

Join us in 2013 people! The economy blows, but otherwise the water is warm ... or changing ... whatever.

The United States isn’t quite as reliant on foreign oil as it used to be.

Imports of crude oil and other petroleum products are on pace to drop to 6 million barrels per day by 2014, according to new forecasts by the Energy Information Administration. That’s the lowest level since 1987. It’s also just half as much liquid fuel as the country was importing back in 2005, at 12.5 million barrels per day.

So what’s responsible for the drop? For starters, the United States is producing more of its own crude. New drilling techniques such as hydraulic fracturing for shale have helped companies access “tight oil” in places like North Dakota and Texas.

And the less-noticed flip side is that Americans are using less oil. Consumption of liquid fuels plummeted during the recession, and it isn’t expected to rebound anytime soon. The EIA projects that Americans will be driving slightly more over the next few years as the economy recovers, but that will be offset by more-efficient vehicles and the retirement of older cars and trucks:
...
Combine those two trends together, and U.S. imports are falling rapidly. By 2014, the EIA expects the country to import just 32 percent of its oil, down from 60 percent in 2005.

So, let's review.

We buy SOME of our oil from other nations, and the percentage is dropping. As of right now, half of that oil comes from countries in the Western Hemisphere. As far as I know, Canada and Mexico generally have our interests at heart, and Venezuela is a basket case.

Look to the right shipmates - which nations is the SECNAV referring to that don't have our best interests at heart?

Let's assume that the Western Hemisphere generally is "feh" to "meh" about the USA at the worst (post-Hugo Venezuela I'm talking to you).

Ditto for African sources of oil. They actually mostly like us.

That leaves the Persian Gulf. 12.9%. Who in the SECNAV's office wants to call the Saudi embassy and tell them that the SECNAV does not think that The Kingdom does not have the best interest at heart? 
Hey, I think honest people can debate that point ... but let's play Mr. Mumble Grumpypants and say they don't. That is 8.1%.  Kuwait? Bahrain? Qatar? UAE? I'm stretching here ... but no, they're mostly fine.

What if we just got rid of Persian Gulf oil at 12.9%.  And the economist in me says;

"Anybody who follows the oil industry will tell you that it doesn't make any difference where the oil comes from," says Keith Crane, an energy expert at RAND Corp.

Global oil markets are so intertwined, Crane says, that changes in any one part of the system can trigger effects elsewhere.

He points out that the U.S. has imposed sanctions on Iran and therefore does not import its oil. But "if Iranian oil goes off the [world] market, it still affects the price in the United States," Crane says.

Meanwhile, Iran has had no real problem selling its oil to Asian countries, though tougher sanctions are set to go into place this summer.

Now that the U.S. involvement in Iraq has wound down, Crane says, oil seems to be less of an American security concern.

"Do you need military might to preserve access to oil? I don't think there's a lot of evidence to say that's really important," he says.

OK. Another opinion, perhaps?

People have tended to exaggerate how much oil we imported from the Middle East. In the long term, it may look like a historical anomaly that the U.S. became so involved in the Persian Gulf.
- John Duffield, energy expert at Georgia State University

OK; get your political Vince Lombardi playing cards out.  Ace of Spades; "Who benefits?"

Let's review the project;

A centerpiece of Mabus' initiative was the Great Green Fleet, a demonstration last year of the Navy's ability to operate its ships and aircraft on biofuels.

During the demonstration, the Navy powered a carrier strike group, which consists of escort ships and aircraft, with 50% biofuels over a two-day exercise. The biofuels were made from a number of sources, including used cooking oil and algae.

The Green Fleet name is a reference to President Theodore Roosevelt's Great White Fleet, a battle group that circled the globe in a demonstration of American seapower in the early part of last century.

Critics saw the Great Green Fleet as a demonstration of wasted taxpayer money. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., has pointed out that the Navy spent $12 million for biofuels at $27 a gallon for the demonstration.

The Navy acknowledges it has paid a premium for biofuels, but insists it is for experimental and test purposes only until the price becomes competitive with conventional fuel.

The Navy's use of the Defense Production Act, designed to allow the military to support industries considered critical to national security, to invest in biofuel refineries has drawn criticism.

"The Navy wants to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in companies to create the market," Forbes says.

Mabus sees the investment in biofuels as a hedge against the vagaries of the world oil markets.

U.S. military aircraft and ships patrolling the Persian Gulf or in the far reaches of the Pacific are forced to purchase much of their fuel from foreign suppliers, where they are hostage to price fluctuations and vulnerable to supply disruptions by rogue states.

Mabus said the Navy has faced skeptics before.

"The Navy has always been on the forefront of changing energy use," Mabus says. He said there were skeptics when the Navy moved from wind to steam.

"Every single time, those naysayers were absolutely wrong," Mabus says. "If price had been the only consideration, we'd still be using sails."

I am all about experimentation, but this vanity project should stop there. The Navy should not be in the industrial energy policy business. The economics is wrong, the geo-political basis is wrong, the justifications are wrong ... and the spin simply cannot stand up to the follow-on question.

The last part of the pull quote is just insulting. The Navy went from sail to steam just as industry did. Ditto from coal to oil. When you look at the driver of sail to coal to oil, what was the big driver? Simple; energy density and economics of moving something further cheaper.

Biofuels - as the MPG on my FlexFuel truck tells me - is not as energy efficient as traditional oil. So, actually, the SECNAVs argument works against him. Not only are biofuels less efficient than normal fuels - they cost more. Pay more - get less.  That is 180deg policy lock-off if I have ever seen it.

I'm sorry - of all the things to expend political capital on - this is not it. 

Meanwhile ... 8-month deployments are being called the norm SECNAV. Please pivot.

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UPDATE: The folks at CIMSEC are engaged in a little parallel play. Worth a read.

The Slow Defeat of the Green Fleet?

Remember the heady days when Salamander and SECNAV Mabus skipped hand in hand through the verdant fields? From when I first found out his present job, to his speech ... and the fact that there are good odds we're related ... it was nice while it lasted.

Alas, then things went pear-shaped. Ship naming was one issue - but I think he really didn't like when I turned on him first with the swap at the whole "Green Fleet" boondoggle. Sad, I saw and still do see a generally nice and effective man - though one who IMAO is misallocating his intellectual and political capital.

He can't like some of the latest news. Are people intentionally blowing off the SECNAV's signature issue - a brave thing to do - or do the smart people see something going on in the background? Has SECNAV sent out messages ... or does the message speak for itself?

Germany is coming to terms with the fact that you can go broke wearing too much green - and we may have a little of that acknowledgement in the background - the Navy might be reaching an understanding as well.

The U.S. Navy’s high-profile program to draw half of its energy from alternative fuels by 2020 didn’t receive much attention during the opening day of the annual Sea-Air-Space conference.

The effort, dubbed the Great Green Fleet and championed by Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, didn’t headline any of the panels. The topic of energy instead came up during an afternoon session that mostly centered on the Marine Corps’ small-scale use of portable solar panels in Afghanistan and during training exercises at stateside posts.

Solar=good. Gold plated fuel by the metric ton? Notsomuch.

If you are interested in digging a little deeper and are still feeling Kermit like - our friend Captain Ike Kiefer, USN has a nice primer.

Some prominent arguments appear almost daily in the media that biofuels will increase our domestic supply of transportation fuel, end our dependence on foreign oil, reduce military vulnerabilities on the battlefield, and generally improve national security. Biofuels are further touted to reduce fuel price volatility, polluting emissions, and green - house gases (GHG) and even stimulate the economy. These arguments all fall apart under scrutiny. The promise and curse of biofuels is that they are limited by the energy that living organisms harvest from the sun and suffer a fatal “catch-22”: uncultivated biofuel yields are far too small, diffuse, and infrequent to displace any meaningful fraction of US primary energy needs, and boosting yields through cultivation consumes more energy than it adds to the biomass. Furthermore, the harvested biomass requires large amounts of additional energy to convert it into the compact, energy-rich, liquid hydrocarbon form required for compatibility with the nation’s fuel infrastructure, transportation sector, and especially the military. The energy content of the final-product biofuel compared to the energy required to produce it proves to be a very poor investment, especially compared to other alternatives. In many cases, there is net loss of energy. When energy balance (energy output minus energy input) across the full fuel creation and combustion lifecycle is considered, cultivated liquid biofuels are revealed to be a modern-day attempt at perpetual motion that is doomed by the laws of thermodynamics and a fatal dependence on fossil fuel energy.

That got a rather lame response from DOD by Adam L. Rosenberg, Ph.D., Deputy Director for Technology Strategy - who has left to become a staffer on the Energy Subcommittee of the House Science, Space, Technology Committee. Follow the money ....

Well ... it makes sense. When the taxpayers are having their Blue Angels held back as DON has a major pout-fest because the peasants are not giving up their seed corn - paying exorbitant amounts per gallon for a quasi-socialist industrial policy on the back of the military budget just does not pass muster.

I think the tide must be turning. I really feel sorry for anyone who missed the turn, and sold a lot of personal capital by writing an obsequious suck-up "Mister, mister, look at me" article.  All that ... and you're left in the wake after corpen. Yea ... that would be sad to see.

The Navy's Solyndra

We are back, again, to the Navy's Great Green Folly.

In its tanks, the USNS Henry J. Kaiser carried nearly 900,000 gallons of biofuel blended with petroleum to power the cruisers, destroyers and fighter jets of what the Navy has taken to calling the "Great Green Fleet," the first carrier strike group to be powered largely by alternative fuels.

Conventionally powered ships and aircraft in the strike group will burn the blend in an operational setting for the first time this month during the 22-nation Rim of the Pacific exercise, the largest annual international maritime warfare maneuvers. The six-week exercise began on Friday.

The Pentagon hopes it can prove the Navy looks as impressive burning fuel squeezed from seeds, algae and chicken fat as it does using petroleum.

But the demonstration, years in the making, may be a Pyrrhic victory.

Some Republican lawmakers have seized on the fuel's $26-a-gallon price, compared to $3.60 for conventional fuel. They paint the program as a waste of precious funds at a time when the U.S. government's budget remains severely strained, the Pentagon is facing cuts and energy companies are finding big quantities of oil and gas in the United States.

Green? How is that track record over the last few years? What was Solyndra? In many ways - just a well meaning political agenda based case of socialist industrial planning - one with the expected results.

What is a folly?

fol·ly
noun, plural fol·lies for 2–6.
...
3. a costly and foolish undertaking; unwise investment or expenditure.
4.Architecture . a whimsical or extravagant structure built to serve as a conversation piece, lend interest to a view, commemorate a person or event, etc.: found especially in England in the 18th century.

Back in December when, sadly, I had a pivot from the SECNAV, I stated the following,

It has become a vanity project, tone-deaf to the financial crunch that the actual operational side of the military is under. It just jumped the cost-benefit shark.

This is more and more a vanity project, going beyond a good and useful experiment.

I like ideas, projects, and tests - but in a headwind of reality, the SECNAV pushes on like some 1930s era Soviet Industrial Policy Commissar.

"The reason we're doing this is that we simply buy too many fossil fuels from either actually or potentially volatile places on earth," Mabus told a conference on climate and security last month.

He says the Pentagon can use its buying muscle - it is the largest single consumer of petroleum in the world - to guarantee the demand needed for biofuel businesses to produce at a scale that will eventually drive down costs.

"We use 2 percent of all the fossil fuels that the United States uses," Mabus told the conference. "And one of the things that this means is that we can bring the market. And to paraphrase the old 'Field of Dreams' line, if the Navy comes, they will build it."

There you go. This is about Commissar Mabus wanting to make the biofuels industry on the backs of an already limited Navy budget that can't even properly fund maintenance of existing ships.

Good idea? Sure - but this is the Navy, not a place for your unsustainable personal projects. The road to insolvency is paved with good ideas that become follies.

Like many of his generation's policies now that they have a firm grip on power - they are stuck in their salad days of the 1970s.

As described by in National Interest by NDU's Paul D. Miller;

But the Middle East’s comparative advantage in energy production and the world’s need for oil both peaked around 1974, and both have been in long-term decline ever since. In reaction to the oil embargoes and disruptions of 1974 and 1979, the Western world embarked on a generational and largely successful effort at energy conservation. The United States’ energy intensity—a measure of how much energy is used per dollar of GDP—has been cut in half since 1973, falling from 15,400 BTUs per dollar to 7,470 in 2010, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. This unheralded success means that because of advances in efficiency and conservation practices, the world economy is less dependent on all forms of energy, oil included, than previously.
...
Even under the inflated numbers, the Middle East accounts for only 46 percent of remaining reserves of oil and liquid natural gas ultimately recoverable with conventional means, according to the IEA.

The other side of "green"

I never really got all that worked up about the quasi-political "Green Navy" pet project by the SECNAV. Afterall, I like concept demonstrations on a small scale to try things out. Bio-diesel isn't a new concept for anyone.

For full disclosure - I am in my own way a "Greenie." When I returned to the states, I almost got a "grease car" myself - but in the climate where Salamanders live, you need better storage options unless you want to feed legions of insects. I am a member of a local organic farm coop ... I compost ... do everything but grow a ponytail and wear patchouli oil ... so I'm not one of "those" anti-green types. I do have a sensitive BS meter though ....

The Navy seemed a little silly getting all worked up about it - kind of like the teenager who thinks they discovered s3x - but that is OK; I gave us the benefit of the doubt as I have a bit of a weakness for the Knight-Errant vibe of it all.

That was then; this is now.

We have huge problems with our budget. We are impacting the lives of thousands of our Sailors because we claim to be in a money crunch. In times like these, any normal organization has to take a serious look at where it is spending its money. You have to get rid of most all "fun to have" and get rid of or scale back the balance of "nice to have."

The Navy's experiment with bio-diesel was interesting in a way - behind the technology curve and a bit blinkered - but worth a demonstration just to confirm that military systems can do the same thing civilian systems ... silly, but OK.

Now, I'm afraid, it is out of control. It has become a vanity project, tone-death to the financial crunch that the actual operational side of the military is under. It just jumped the cost-benefit shark.

The Navy – along with its newest ally, the Agriculture Department – announced Monday that they are purchasing nearly a half-million gallons of biofuels for an air-sea military exercise next summer. “Our use of fossil fuels is a very real threat to our national security, and to the U.S. Navy's ability to protect America and to project power overseas,” Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said.

A quick jog around the calculator shows the deal is costing the government about $26.66 a gallon for the biofuel alone.

Wholesale.

Look though - they let the mask slip a bit.

Mabus and Tom Vilsack, the ag boss, said they are buying 450,000 gallons of fuel – for $12 million – from Solazyme and Dynamic Fuels LLC, a joint venture of Tyson Foods, Inc. and the Syntroleum Corporation. Solarzyme's fuel is derived from algae, and Dynamics comes from used cooking oil and animal fat not suitable for food. Mabus added that the fuels, his latest push for a "Great Green Fleet," can be used without engine mods.

The deal marks the largest government purchase of biofuel in history, and will be used to power a carrier battle group during next summer's maritime operation off Hawaii (the carrier is nuclear powered, but the other vessels – and the aircraft based on the carrier -- will be using a 50-50 mix of biofuel and standard petroleum products).

The Navy has long been a trendsetter in this area, Mabus noted. “We went from sail to coal in the 1850s, we went from coal to oil in the early part of the 20th century, and we pioneered nuclear in the 1950s.” he said. “And we're going to lead once again by helping establish a market for biofuels.”

Who made Van Jones Undersecretary of the Navy? And for the record - the Navy had nothing to do with establishing a market for coal or oil that wasn't already happening. Any economic historian will tell you that.

"... helping establish a market for biofuels." About as catchy as "Global Force for Good."