Senate Votes to Save the Navy's 'Great Green Fleet'

The Senate on Wednesday threw a life raft to the Navy's beleaguered plan to power its ships and jets with biofuel.

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus trumpeted the program as key to service's long-term stability, pledging $170 million to kickstart the wobbly biofuel industry, promising to get half the Navy's fuel from alternative sources by 2020, and making plans to dispatch an eco-friendly 'Great Green Fleet' in 2016.

But the ambitious plan appeared to be all but dead in May. Some Congressmen were ticked off by the $15 per-gallon price ' four times the going rate for old-school fuel ' and wary of the White House's interest in green technologies after the meltdown of Solyndra, the administration-friendly solar firm. Nor did key lawmakers much care for Mabus' push for the alternative fuels at a time when the budgets for ships and sailors were rapidly shrinking. A little-noticed Defense Department report surfaced showing that the Navy could spend as much as an extra $1.76 billion per year on biofuel.

Both the Republican-led House Armed Services Committee and the Democratic-led Senate Armed Services Committee passed amendments to the Pentagon's budget that forbade the Defense Department from paying any more for green fuels than for fossil ones. That kind of restriction, if codified into law, would effectively kill any more biofuel buys. Observers ' including this one ' said the chances were 'growing dim' that the Navy would ever get the chance to make those purchases.

But several things changed after the legislative defeats. The Navy ran a successful, if limited, test of their biofuels during a brief demonstration sail of the 'Great Green Fleet,' an alternatively powered carrier strike group. They pledged never to overpay for biofuels, ever, while the Solyndra scandal slid off the front pages. Behind the scenes, groups like the Pew Project on National Security, Energy and Climate lobbied lawmakers. Then, of course, President Obama won re-election. That left Republicans a little less eager for budget-cutting measures, and Democrats a little more inclined to back the president, who had strongly and vocally supported the biofuel push.

On Wednesday, the Senate voted to strip away the anti-biofuel amendment, 62-37. Republicans John Barrasso, John Thune, Roy Blunt and Jerry Moran. So did Susan Collins, who missed the May vote on biofuels in the Armed Services Committee ' allowing the amendment to pass by a single 'yea.'

'DOD is the largest single user of oil in the world, consuming more than 355,000 barrels of oil per day in Fiscal Year 2011. Despite increased domestic production of traditional fossil fuels, rising global oil prices and market volatility caused DOD's fuel bill to rise more than $19 billion in Fiscal Year 2011,' Collins and 37 of her colleagues wrote in a letter to the Senate's leadership (.pdf), urging for the amendment to be taken out. 'Alternative fuels will not supplant fossil fuels entirely; however, replacing even a fraction of the fuel consumed by DOD with domestic alternative fuels has the potential to advance U.S. national security, strategic flexibility, and insulate the defense budget against future spikes in the cost of fossil fuels.'

The alternative-fuel effort still faces major hurdles. A second amendment remains in place that bars the Navy from spending that $170 million to promote the biofuel industry. The House of Representatives is not only controlled by Republicans, but Republicans far more conservative than Collins. They're far less less likely to change direction on the biofuel push.