This Should Be A Laugh, But It Is About Potential Terrorism, So It is Not Funny.

President Obama was nicely displayed in front of a sparkling new F-18A(ex) fighter plane, giving a moderately passionate Earth Day speech. The new fighter jet uses a mixture of bio-fuel and regular jet fuel for propulsion. This is a symbol of how the Pentagon is taking charge to lower our dependency on international energy resources, to make the United States more secure. The Pentagon and military are responsible for some 30% of the consumption of fossil fuels we consume. So this has to be a good idea: use renewable energy for military needs.

First, I need to mention that the least expensive natural energy resource that is plentiful, natural gas, is burned off at a rate of 3 billion cubic feet a day in North America. And the lowest cost oil is still coming from Venezuela, where they burn off about 5% of the natural gas burned.

Picture a quiet day in the Middle East, probably Iran, and the Senior I mullah has completed the second prayer of the day. He is a holy man and fully consecrates the health and well being of his people. He returns to his study and takes out two small wire cages, one with a locust and one with a grasshopper. He proceeds to feed each insect a green grain, selected from a pouch recently collected from a farm in Iowa. Good! They love the green material. He prays for a rain of grasshopper and locusts on the American fields.

Energy security is a crazy-quilt of conflicting resources. My scenario is that a field of this green renewable needs to produce about 30 gallons an acre to get close to being economic on the farm. A raw acre of corn yields under $100/acre net. At $3.10 a gallon for the processed renewable fuel, the farmer can trade crops, without a subsidy. Forget ethanol, please! This is about jet fuel. A hundred acre farm would keep the F-18A (ex) flying for about three days. If the plane is operational for 100 days, that is 10,000 acres of fuel. That is 5 square miles of crop per plane… a fleet of 12 would need 60 square miles to support it. OK, I have not considered multiple crops per year, and Iowa can easily support a couple hundred jets if the crops are good.

The new terror threat becomes grasshoppers, locust, and a crazy guy with too much Round-Up! Fact: canola was a major source of high quality oil for air craft engines during WWII, and a natural grasshopper infestation nearly delayed D-Day.

If in fact the Pentagon is responsible for 30% of the fossil fuel consumption, then grow the renewable, but cut their budget by 25% too. Happy Earth Day.