When Barack Obama announced today he was lifting the ban on some offshore oil drilling, he did so standing before a Navy F-18.  “This navy fighter jet,” Obama announced, “appropriately called the Green Hornet, will be flown for the first time in just a few days, on Earth Day. If tests go as planned, it will be the first plane ever to fly faster than the speed of sound on a fuel mix that is half biomass.”

Although this test will be with a Navy plane, it has been the Air Force leading the way in the alternative fuel search.  In an op-ed that led me to begin this site in the first place, I wrote about the Air Force effort to create jet fuel (specifically, JP-8) from a mix containing half liquefied coal (Coal to Liquid, or CTL).   Later that year, the USAF worked with the Energy & Environmental Research Center at the University of North Dakota to create a 100% renewable form of JP-8 made from crop oil and waste greases.   Last week, an Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt flew a test mission using a 100% synthetic fuel manufactured from camelina oil.

The US Department of Defense is the single largest consumer of petroleum in the world, and the Air Force is the single largest customer within the DoD.  Through a combination of CTL and renewable sources, the Air Force hopes to fly half its missions using alternative fuels by mid-decade.    This would provide a significant downward price pressure on petroleum worldwide.    I would like to see the goal extended.  While it might be decades before our nation as a whole can relieve its dependence on foreign oil, we can realistically set a goal of having our military free of dependence on oil imports from outside of North America by no later than 2020.