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9/11-15/08 
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GAS STRIKE FLYER:
The US Department of Defense (DoD) is the largest oil consuming government body in the US and in the world
“Military fuel consumption makes the Department of Defense the single largest consumer of petroleum in the U.S” [1]
“Military fuel consumption for aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and facilities makes the DoD the single largest consumer of petroleum in the U.S” [2]
According to the US Defense Energy Support Center Fact Book 2004, in Fiscal Year 2004, the US military fuel consumption increased to 144 million barrels. This is about 40 million barrels more than the average peacetime military usage.
By the way, 144 million barrels makes 395 000 barrels per day, almost as much as daily energy consumption of Greece.
The US military is the biggest purchaser of oil in the world.
In 1999 Almanac edition of the Defense Logistic Agency’s news magazine Dimensions it was stated that the DESC “purchases more light refined petroleum product than any other single organization or country in the world. With a $3.5 billion annual budget, DESC procures nearly 100 million barrels of petroleum products each year. That's enough fuel for 1,000 cars to drive around the world 4,620 times.”
That budget increased a lot over the years. The US DoD spent $8.2 billion on energy in fiscal year 2004.
“In fiscal 2005, DESC will buy about 128 million barrels of fuel at a cost of $8.5 billion, and Jet fuel constitutes nearly 70 percent of DoD's petroleum product purchases.” says American Forces Information Service News Article by G. J. Gilmore. [3]
For some, this is not enough though. Here is what a report from Office of Under Secretary of Defense says “Because DOD’s consumption of oil represents the highest priority of all uses, there will be no fundamental limits to DOD’s fuel supply for many, many decades.” [4]
American GI is the most energy-consuming soldier ever seen on the field of war
“The Army calculated that it would burn 40 million gallons of fuel in three weeks of combat in Iraq, an amount equivalent to the gasoline consumed by all Allied armies combined during the four years of World War I.” [1]
In May 2005 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Robert Bryce gives another example; “The Third Army (of General Patton) had about 400,000 men and used about 400,000 gallons of gasoline a day. Today the Pentagon has about a third that number of troops in Iraq yet they use more than four times as much fuel.”
The US military oil consumption overseas and the world oil demand
According to the Defence Logistic Agency’s Web Site, as of November 2005 more than 2.1 billion gallons of fuel have been used in support of Operation Enduring Freedom (since October 2001; war on terrorism in Afghanistan).
In the May 2005 issue of the Atlantic Monthly article Robert Bryce says that “The U.S. military now uses about 1.7 million gallons of fuel a day in Iraq. … each of the 150,000 soldiers on the ground consumes roughly nine gallons of fuel a day. And that figure has been rising.” This mean in Iraq each day 40 000 b/d of oil is consumed by the US military.
Yes, something is wrong with that figure. Compare it with the one given by the Defense Logistics Agency spokeswoman Lana Hampton. Accroding to an American Forces Information Service News Article she said the U.S. military is using between 10 million and 11 million barrels of fuel each month to sustain operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. This makes 330 000 - 360 000 barrel per day.
This is more than double the amount of oil used in the Gulf war!
According to a Rand Corporation report “1.88 billion gallons of fuel were consumed within the U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility during Operations Desert Shild and Desert Storm (ODS/S), between August 10, 1990 and May 31, 1991.” [5]. This makes 44.8 million barrels, or 150 000 barrels a day. Note that ODS/S lasted 295 days.
Moreover, “during ODS/S Saudi Arabia and the UAE supplied fuels without charge (1.5 billion gallons), whereas Bahrain, Egypt, Oman and Qatar charged for the fuels,” adds the Rand report.
Did Saudi Arabia and the UAE report that fuel as export? Did the US report it as import? Was it counted as Saudi or UAE domestic consumption? Or Was it counted as the US consumption?
I am afraid the answers to those three questions are No, No, No and No!
But that amount was surely counted in production.
My experience with international oil statistics tell me that the US military oil consumption overseas disappears in world oil demand. Hence, demand is understated at least that much.
Is about 350 000 barrel per day missing oil demand important?
Sources cited:
[1] Presentation by American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Red Cavaney held at the USAF/API Awards Banquet – Arlington, Virginia, July 15, 2004. See also National Defense Magazine article in 2002.
[2] E. C. Aldbridge and D. M. Etter testimony before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on June 5, 2001.
[3] American Forces Information Service News Article by G. J. Gilmore, DoD Has Enough Petroleum Products for Anti-Terror War, August 11, 2005. The article is posted also on DCmilitary
[4] More Capable Warfighting Through Reduced Fuel Burden, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, The Defense Science Board Task Force on Improving Fuel Efficiency of Weapons Platforms, January 2001,
[5] J.P. Stucker, J.F. Schank and B. Dombey-Moore, Assessment of DoD Fuel Standardisation Policies, Rand Corporation, 1994.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dr. Sohbet Karbuz (a Turkish citizen), is former head of non-OECD energy statistics section of the International Energy Agency (Paris). Before joining the IEA he held academic positions in Germany and Austria.
-BA
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I think that to understand how the price of gas got to $4.20 a gallon, we first need to throw out everything the government & corporate media have told us about Big Oil.
Second, we need to understand that if we don't act now that gas will go to $7/8 dollars a gallon or $200. a barrel.
Third, this is not a one-day gas strike or a boycott of certain stations. To reach a solution you must first understand the problem. So lets examine how we went from about a buck fifty for a gallon of petro when Bush took office to our current $4.20 a gallon.
What happened?
The two major changes in oil supply since Bush has taken office are:
1. Bush has been driving tanks & humvees all over the desert which get 5 to 8 miles to the gallon.
2. China's & India's oil consumption has increased.
Increased demand restricts supply unless out put is increased, which raises prices. OPEC has said that they will NOT increase production to meet increasing demand. They have figured out that they have a dwindling resource & when it is gone their children will be living in a desert with no other natural resource to replace it.
Big Oils profits are due to the billions of gallons of crude the Marines, Airforce, Army & private contractors have used hauling all of that equipment plus hundreds of thousands of troops overseas.
The Military May 2005 Atlantic MonthlyOne of the U.S. military's greatest vulnerabilities in Iraq is its enormous appetite for fuel. The insurgents have figured this outby Robert BryceGas Pains
The Department of Defense now has about 27,000 vehicles in Iraq—and every one of them gets lousy gas mileage. To power that fleet the Defense Logistics Agency must move huge quantities of fuel into the country in truck convoys from Kuwait, Turkey, and Jordan. All that fuel gives American soldiers a tremendous battlefield advantage (in communications, mobility, and firepower, among other things). But overseeing and carrying out this process requires the work of some 20,000 American soldiers and private contractors. Every day some 2,000 trucks leave Kuwait alone for various locales in Iraq.In addition to the challenges posed by the volume of fuel needed, the Army's logisticians must deal with the sheer variety of fuels. Although the Pentagon has tried to reduce the number of fuels it consumes, and now relies primarily on a jet-fuel-like substance called JP-8, the Defense Energy Support Center is currently supplying fourteen kinds of fuel to U.S. troops in Iraq.In short, the American GI is the most energy-consuming soldier ever seen on the field of war. For computers and GPS units, Humvees and helicopters, the modern soldier is in constant need of energy: battery power, electric power, and petroleum. The U.S. military now uses about 1.7 million gallons of fuel a day in Iraq. Some of that fuel goes to naval vessels and aircraft, but even factoring out JP-5 fuel (which is what the Navy primarily uses), each of the 150,000 soldiers on the ground consumes roughly nine gallons of fuel a day. And that figure has been rising.Some of the rise in consumption is due to the insurgents' use of improvised explosive devices, which account for about 30 percent of all American combat deaths since the occupation began. As John Pike, the executive director of GlobalSecurity.org, told me, "This is a war of convoy ambushes and car bombs. There is no front line." Perhaps hundreds of American vehicles have been destroyed by IEDs (the exact number is classified), and hundreds of soldiers—many of them guarding convoys—have been killed or injured by them. (And more than sixty-five private contractors are known to have been killed by convoy attacks or IEDs since July of 2003.) Cheap, easy to use, and highly effective, IEDs have forced the Americans to add armor to their fleet of Humvees in Iraq. A fully armored Humvee weighs more than five tons—and requires a larger engine and heavier suspension than the non-armored model. The Army also recently allocated more than $500 million to add armor to its utility trucks.The added armor will help protect U.S. soldiers from IEDs and snipers—but it also means higher fuel consumption for their vehicles. Which means, in turn, that more tanker trucks will have to be driven into Iraq—and those trucks will provide more targets for the insurgents, who have become skilled at attacking them. It's difficult to guard them all. When insurgents see that American patrols are increasing in one region, they can quickly and easily shift their attacks—on fueling stations, pipelines, truck convoys, refineries—to another region.It's a vicious cycle: attacks on convoys produce a need for more armor, which produces a need for more fuel, which produces larger convoys, which produce more targets for attack. Over the past six months the Army and the Air Force have had to specially train more than 1,000 additional soldiers to perform convoy security. One tank commander, who returned from Iraq last spring, told me that he had been so concerned about his supply lines that he had stationed sentries at one-mile intervals along the highway in his sector.Logistics is an old and critically important issue in war. During World War II the German general Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps was stymied in North Africa by a shortage of fuel for its tanks. A lack of gasoline also halted the gallop across France of General George Patton's Third Army in the summer of 1944. The Third Army had about 400,000 men and used about 400,000 gallons of gasoline a day. Today the Pentagon has about a third that number of troops in Iraq—yet they use more than four times as much fuel.Given that the longer the fuel supply lines, the greater the vulnerability for our military, logic would suggest we try to reduce our fuel requirements. But over the past several decades the Pentagon has bought billions of dollars' worth of tanks, trucks, and other vehicles with little or no consideration to their fuel efficiency. In decades past, U.S. Army logisticians assumed that 50 percent of the tonnage moved onto a battlefield was ammunition, 30 percent was fuel, and the rest was food, water, and supplies. Today the fuel component may be as high as 70 percent, according to a study done in 2001 by the Defense Science Board.The insurgents' tactics may not stop the flow of motor fuel to American troops, but they are part of the broader war that is forcing the United States and its allies in Iraq to defend every pipeline, every refinery, every tanker truck, and every fuel depot. Even in peacetime that's a difficult task.Meanwhile, the U.S. military in Iraq is in a bind. It has no choice but to continue fortifying its vehicles with armor and pumping imported fuel into, for example, the Bradley fighting vehicle (which gets less than two miles per gallon) and the M1 Abrams tank (less than one mile per gallon). But all the fuel demanded by those armaments and vehicles creates logistical and military headaches. The tank commander I spoke to told me that soldiers on the ground are beginning to see that "the more fuel-efficient we are, the more tactically sound we are."But U.S. military commanders seem not to see that connection. At the conclusion of its study the DSB recommended that the Pentagon make fuel efficiency a key consideration when buying new weapons systems. The Joint Chiefs of Staff dismissed the proposal in August of that year.Richard Truly, a former astronaut who recently retired as the head of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, chaired the DSB study. "The thing we were trying to get across was that this doesn't have anything to do with moral values," Truly told me. "It has to do with running the goddamn military with as little fuel as possible and showing the advantages to the warfighter himself—so that instead of having ten fuel trucks, you can have five." Unfortunately, Truly says, the prevailing wisdom at the Pentagon is that "fuel efficiency is for sissies."Robert Bryce is the author of Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America's Superstate and Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron.
