If the Military Is Planning for a Fossil-Fuel Crisis, So Should Colleges

A news item this week caused a stir among people who pay attention to energy issues. But did any college administrators take notice?

Granted, the item on its surface had little to do with higher education: The U.S. military is increasingly nervous about its dependence on fossil fuels, reports The New York Times. That dependence presents some vulnerabilities in distant war zones, the Times reported:

Fossil fuel accounts for 30 to 80 percent of the load in convoys into Afghanistan, bringing costs as well as risk. While the military buys gas for just over $1 a gallon, getting that gallon to some forward operating bases costs $400.

“We had a couple of tenuous supply lines across Pakistan that are costing us a heck of a lot, and they’re very dangerous,” said Gen. James T. Conway, the commandant of the Marine Corps.

The impetus for the Times story was a report released last month by a defense think tank, which stated that the problem goes far beyond the difficulties of tenuous and expensive supply lines. It contained a full-blown argument for grappling with peak oil, the notion that oil supplies will one day reach a peak or plateau, then begin an inexorable decline, leading to problems in any activity that depends on burning oil for energy, whether agriculture, transportation, shipping goods, waging wars—or commuting to college. Dependence on fossil fuel, a finite resource, was the root concern clearly laid out in the opening lines of that report:

[W]hile many of today’s weapons and transportation systems are unlikely to change dramatically or be replaced for decades, the petroleum needed to operate DOD [Department of Defense] assets may not remain affordable, or even reliably available, for the lifespans of these systems.

To ready America’s armed forces for tomorrow’s challenges, DOD should ensure that it can operate all of its systems on non-petroleum fuels by 2040. This 30-year timeframe reflects market indicators pointing toward both higher demand for petroleum and increasing international competition to acquire it. Moreover, the geology and economics of producing petroleum will ensure that the market grows tight long before petroleum reserves are depleted. Some estimates indicate that the current global reserve-to-production (R/P) ratio—how fast the world will produce all currently known recoverable petroleum reserves at the current rate of production—is less than 50 years. Thus, given projected supply and demand, we cannot assume that oil will remain affordable or that supplies will be available to the United States reliably three decades hence. Ensuring that DOD can operate on non-petroleum fuels 30 years from today is a conservative hedge against prevailing economic, political and environmental trends, conditions and constraints.

Of course, the peak-oil crowd took notice—not least because this is just the latest alarm raised by military organizations and government agencies about future oil supplies. In early September, Der Spiegel reported on a leaked German military document that discussed the economic, political, and social havoc that could result from a fossil-fuel crisis. Earlier, The Guardian reported that governments were increasingly nervous about energy supplies, as part of a series about peak-oil concerns among policy makers.

What does this have to do with higher education? Colleges ought to be thinking about long-term strategies for dealing with oil-supply problems. For now, many colleges are composing 10- to 40-year plans to go carbon-neutral. That’s grappling with an out-of-the-tailpipe problem, when colleges may have to deal with an into-the-fuel-tank problem, as put by Rob Hopkins, founder of a British movement to break oil dependency. (Of course, the climate and oil-dependency efforts may be complementary.)

What’s the military’s response to this threat? Ray Mabus, the Navy secretary and a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, “has said he wants 50 percent of the power for the Navy and Marines to come from renewable energy sources by 2020,” The Times reports. The think-tank report, you’ll note, says the military should be able to run on renewable sources by 2040. Pragmatic energy experts like Vaclav Smil, a peak-oil skeptic from the University of Manitoba, along with partisan energy experts like Robert Bryce, of the conservative Manhattan Institute, and the vehement left-winger James Howard Kunstler, would probably say that the military’s hopes of breaking oil dependency are delusional. (Mr. Bryce would even say misguided.) Nothing matches the energy density of fossil fuels in an increasingly energy-hungry world. But the military seems to accomplish amazing technical feats when it puts its vast resources and clout behind something, so who knows?

For colleges—which are smaller than the military, and which have local resources to draw from—the road will be in some ways easier and in some ways more difficult. But they should start planning now.