How Much Gas Does the Pentagon Use?

[beetbox]

These figures are dated, five years old, and much has changed. we now have a war (?) for which the Pentagon requisitioned 7.5 billion gallons of fuel for fiscal 2005.
We now have a military budget that is about 70% higher than what it was when these figures were fresh.

Maybe someone out there can get the updated figures on total amount of fuel the Pentagon used in 2004 and plans to use for 2005?


Most of DOD's five billion gallons of annual petroleum use fuels weapons platforms—land, sea, and air—that are manifestly inefficient.

It wasn't hard to decide that 0.56-mpg tanks and 17-feet-per-gallon aircraft carriers are just as unnecessarily wasteful as civilian gas-guzzlers.

Thus the Air Force in FY1999 paid $1.8 billion for two billion gallons of fuel, but delivering that fuel into the aircraft added another $2.6 billion, so the actual delivered fuel bill was $4.4 billion: the Air Force spent 84 percent of its fuel-delivery cost on the 6 percent of its gallons that were delivered in midair.

The Army's formidable half-mile-a-gallon M1A2 tanks are powered by inefficient 1960s-design gas turbines that yield 1500 horsepower to make 68 tons dash around a battlefield at 30 mph (42 on the road). They do that pretty well. But 60- to 80-odd percent of the time, that huge turbine is idling at one percent efficiency to run a 5-kilowatt "hotel load," mostly air conditioning and electronics.

Each tank is trailed by lumbering fuel tankers. An armored division may use as much as 20, perhaps even 40, times as many daily tons of fuel as it does of munitions—around 600,000 gallons a day.

http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid939.php