STARKVILLE — Imagine: Sugar cane stalks or carbons from the runoff of a local brewery will one day power your car. Perhaps a shuttle bus, a home or a military base.
The thought may conjure memories of Dr. Emmit Brown’s “Mr. Fusion” fuel system in the movie “Back to the Future Part 2.” In the opening scene, Brown rummages through Marty McFly’s garbage to find organic materials to power his time machine. He eventually uses a banana peel and soda to power the machine to the year 2015.
The concept of using organic materials and waste to create energy isn’t as far fetched as it seemed when the movie opened in 1989. The United States Navy hopes to use biofuel to power at least 50 percent of its operations by 2020.
It’s the next progression in using more efficient energy sources, as the U.S. — and the world — labor to find an alternative to crude oil.
“It’s been 100 years since we started using fossil fuels for military energy,” said Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, keynote speaker Thursday at the Mississippi State University Biofuels Conference. “It’s about to change, and the Navy can lead the way in doing that. We changed from coal to oil in the early part of 20th century. We pioneered nuclear energy for the 1950s.”
The U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Energy and Department of Agriculture have each invested $170 million to come up with a nationwide, commercially viable biofuels industry.
Mabus, an Ackerman native and former governor of Mississippi, believes the Navy can help expedite biofuels to commercialization by providing a market, one that has an annual budget of $150 billion and the need to power an enormous fleet of ships.
“I can’t give you a date (for commercialization), but I can say the military has a history in leading change like that and making products commercially viable that otherwise might not have been,” Mabus said. “It happened with the Internet, with GPS, with flat-screen TVs.”
The Navy’s need for alternative fuel hinges on the fluctuating prices of oil. In 1997, oil was $18 a barrel. Today, the price of a barrel hovers around $100. Each time the price of a barrel rises by $1, the Navy pays an additional $31 million in fuel costs, Mabus said.
“The only way to compensate is by cutting back our operations,” he added. “Energy security is independence. If we don’t do it as a military force, we’re taking a huge risk that’s not justified.”
Mississippi and MSU are positioned to play a key role in the biofuels industry, both through university research and timber products that are grown in the state. Wood residue, cotton wood, black willow, pine and switchgrass are used to create biofuel.
At the MSU Sustainable Energy Research Center, in the Thad E. Cochran Research Park, different types of biofuel are generated and tested for operation and emissions. MSU will soon be able to produce up to four barrels a day of bio-oil or synthetic gas. To do so, the facility needs at least four tons of raw materials, which can be derived from timber byproducts, industrial waste or wastewater.
Louisiana-based Harrelson and Associates has licensed a waste reactor technology developed at MSU and is going to use it at one of its waste sites in the Quitman County city of Marks.
By burning waste, they hope to reduce the volume of waste they dispose of by 90 percent. They’ll make a gas in the process and turn it into fuel.
“It’s great when the price of the biomass is pretty good because somebody is paying you to come get it,” MSU Sustainable Energy Center Director Glenn Steele said. “Using the sewage is a great opportunity, because you already had something you had to pay to get rid of. Now you can turn it into fuel.”
Steele said the SERC is about a year away from being able to power MSU’s shuttle system with biofuels, which would provide a great scale for future testing and showcasing the technology.
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