Do Renewable Energy Sources Have a Place in Our Military?

By Dick Martin

I usually limit our Sunday Features to military related topics.  Renewable energy resources, ie. Wind and Solar are not by themselves military topics, but the military’s deep direct reliance on energy require that if they want to continue to be a world power and affect the future of the world , they have to always be aware of the energy component of any decisions that they make.   Personally, I don’t feel that I know enough about reliable renewable energy sources to have any firm opinions.  I do know that:

1. The sun does not always shine and wind does not always blow.
2. Wind and solar combined provide only about 4% of our energy needs.
3. Probably not in our lifetime, we will run out of fossil fuels.
4. Compared to fossil fuels, at this point in time, renewable energy is cost prohibitive.
5. Since we do know that we will run out of carbon energy sources; in the meantime, it seems prudent for us to continue to develop renewable energy sources so we will be ready for that date.

Recently, I was talking to John Hollman about this topic, and he directed me to an article on the subject titled “Mines, Minerals, and “Green” Energy” authored by  Mark P Mills, who is an senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a faculty fellow of Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.  The following is an edited summary of his article: 

Among the material realities of green energy are:

1. Building wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity requires, on average, more than ten times the quantity of materials, compared with building machines using hydrocarbons to deliver the same amount of energy;
2. A single electric car contains more cobalt than 1000 smartphone batteries, and the blades on a single wind turbine have more plastic than 5 million smartphones;
3. Replacing hydrocarbons with green machines will vastly increase the mining of various critical minerals; ie., a single electric car battery weighing 1000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials.  All energy-producing machinery must be fabricated from material extracted from the earth.  Compared with hydrocarbons, green machines entail, on average, a 10-fold increase in the quantities of materials extracted and processed to produce the same amount of energy;
4. Oil, natural gas and coal are needed to produce the concrete, steel, plastics and purified minerals used to build green machines.  The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil are used in the processes to fabricate a single battery that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil;
5. By 2050, the quantity of worn out solar panels will constitute double the tonnage of all of today’s global plastic waste, and by 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage.
6. Left out of current discussions is any serious consideration of the broad environmental and supply-chain implications of renewable energy.  Any significant expansion of today’s level of green energy--currently less than 4% of the country’s total consumption (versus 56% from oil and gas) will create an unprecedented increase in global mining for needed minerals.  Imports make up 100% of some 17 key minerals and for another 29, over half of domestic needs are imported.
7. Replacing the energy output from a single 100 MW natural gas-fired turbine, requires at least 20 wind turbines, each one about the size of the Washington Monument.  Building those wind machines consumes enormous quantities of conventional materials; ie., about 30,000 tons of iron ore and 50,000 tons of concrete and 900 tons of non-recyclable plastics.
8. Recycling plays a role in providing all of the materials necessary for the construction and running of renewable energy machines, but the idea of a green energy circular economy based on the goal of 100% recycling is a pipe dream.

Theoretically, we will eventually run out of fossil energy.  This would make us a second-rate military power.  All of the above problems are daunting, but my experience in the oil industry is that the US companies are able to solve or mitigate the above problems to a manageable level.  The oil industry is capable of solving many complex problems, as long as there is an incentive to do so. 

“Where there is a will, there is a way.”

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