Feb 2, 2010

The Pentagon addresses energy and climate and Boing2 answers math

Bonig2 Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review includes a focus on the national security concerns that go along with both climate change, and energy use. Highlights include efforts to convert the nontactical vehicle fleet away from gasoline-dependence, and a Navy plan to deploy a carrier strike group running on biofuels and nuclear power by 2016.

FAQ's via boin2 comments - Please share and add yours
Can anyone provide some figures on percentage of global petroleum usage dedicated to military purposes?

US military energy consumption- facts and figures


EnergyBulletin FACT 1: The DoD's total primary energy consumption in Fiscal Year 2006 was 1100 trillion Btu. It corresponds to only 1% of total energy consumption in USA. For those of you who think that this is not much then read the next sentence. Nigeria, with a population of more than 140 million, consumes as much energy as the U.S. military.

The DoD per capita[2] energy consumption (524 trillion Btu) is 10 times more than per capita energy consumption in China, or 30 times more than that of Africa. Total final energy consumption (called site delivered energy by DoD) of the DoD was 844 trillion Btu in FY2006.

EnergyBulletin FACT 2: Defense Energy Support Center (DESC) sold $13 billion of energy to DoD services in FY2006. More than half of it was to Air Force.

No need to look further than Wikipedia for the basics - The Department of Defense uses 4,600,000,000 US gallons (1.7×1010 L) (4.6 billion gallons) of fuel annually, an average of 12,600,000 US gallons (48,000,000 L) (12.6 million gallons) of fuel per day.

U.S. oil consumption is approximately 21 million barrels/day

Karl Jones, you might've read that the DoD is responsible for the (very large) majority of *governmental* energy consumption, which is reasonable enough !

Google says 12.6 million gallons is 300,000 oil barrels, a suspiciously round number, so I wonder if the gallons was derived from the barrels figure to be more impressive or because they figured no one knew what a barrel is. Google's calculator function will help us here..

FACT - 4.6 billion US gallons = 109,523,810 oil barrels

So it looks like the US-military-oil-year equals about 5 US-civilian-oil-days..
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Haase - Sorry to plug the
EnergyBulletin, but they have much awesomeness in content on energy.