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Mr. Rick Kamin
My goal today is to provide a brief overview of where the Navy
currently stands in its alternative fuels efforts, what we have learned
from our testing, what we have accomplished, and the direction
for the future. To begin, I will summarize the Navy’s energy goals
(Figure 1).
Let us put those goals into perspective. To get to 50% alternative energy use by 2020, the Navy will need to provide 8 million barrels of alternate-source fuel for use by its aircraft and ships.
From an industry that is starting from scratch, that is a big challenge for the next decade, but the Navy is willing to step up as an
early adopter to work with industry to make that challenge happen.
To meet our near-term goals of demonstrating a Green Strike
Group by 2012 and sailing the Great Green Fleet by 2016, we
need to approve a fuel for those aircraft in that timeframe. So, just
Mr. Rick Kamin received a B.S. in chemical engineering from Lehigh
University. He has 28 years of experience in the area of fuels technology. He currently holds the title of Naval Air Systems Command
Research and Engineering Fellow. His current responsibilities include
the following: Navy Fuels Team Lead responsible for the direction of
all Navy fuel (aircraft, ship, and missile) in-service engineering and
research, development, test, and evaluation programs; Navy Task Force
Energy Fuel Working Group lead responsible for alternative fuel test
and certification; and Navy Task Force Energy Aviation Working Group
co-lead responsible for Navy Aviation Energy Strategy. Mr. Kamin has
authored more than 50 technical reports and articles and holds one
U.S. patent. He is a member of the ASTM Aviation Fuel Subcommittee,
the Coordinating Research Council Aviation Steering Committee, the
International Association for the Stability, Handling and Use of Liquid
Fuels Steering Committee, and the Tri-Service Petroleum, Oil, and
Lubricants Users Group Steering Committee.
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15 months from now we are going to have an operational demonstration of aircraft powered by biofuel. The challenge is to approve
a fuel to make that happen.
Figure 1. Navy Energy Goals
Figure 2. Near-Term Alternatives to Petroleum
What are the near-term alternatives available today? There
are basically two choices (Figure 2). The first converts some raw
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material—whether coal, natural gas, or biomass—to gas, which
is then liquefied into a synthetic crude using what is called the
Fischer–Tropsch (FT) process. That liquid is then refined into finished product. The second choice is to use a hydro-treated renewable source, such as oil-rich plants or algae. This process basically
takes the oils, the lipids, from the plants or algae, converts that oil
into biocrude, takes that biocrude through a refining process, and
turns it into jet fuel or ship fuel.
How does that differ from petroleum? In both cases you end
up with a “crude” that goes through a refinery process so there are
a lot of similarities between the end products that you get from
petroleum, which we have used forever in aviation, and some of
these alternatives. Because the hydro-treated renewables provide
environmental benefits, there is a big push in industry to make this
happen and there is a lot of potential for it to go into use within
naval aviation.
Figure 3. Alternative Fuels Strategy
The challenge comes because naval aviation has been using
liquid hydrocarbon fuels for a very long time. If you look at the
aircraft systems that the Navy plans to employ in the future, it is
clear that we are going to be wedded to liquid hydrocarbons for
the remainder of my lifetime and for the lifetimes of our current
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aircrews. The liquid hydrocarbon fuels that we use today have
always come from petroleum. We have geared all our development and all our designs around petroleum-based liquid hydrocarbon. We cannot change our fuel type drastically now. The systems
that are in place, as well as those that will be coming on in the near
future, such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, are going to be with us
for decades. So the key to developing appropriate alternative fuels
is to show that we can have a drop-in replacement, and that is the
challenge (Figure 3).
Figure 4. From Field to Fleet: Certifying Drop-In
Replacements
Drop-in replacement means that we are not going to change
our aircraft weapon systems, we are not going to change our
engines, and we are not going to change our fuel systems. Our
capability for storing and distributing fuel at sea is rather limited,
so we cannot send multiple aviation products through different
lines and different tanks and expect them to be segregated in our
shipboard environment. Thus, the critical path of our strategy is
to demonstrate that these fuels from alternative sources are fully
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drop-in replacements. Drop-in replacement means that the guys
who fly do not know or care where the fuel comes from. They just
want to be sure that we have guaranteed that it will work the same,
whether it comes from petroleum, from algae, or from a plant.
The key to this is a process for demonstrating the required
similarity that extends from the laboratory to the weapon system
(Figure 4). The goal of that process is to show that any fuel produced from sources other than petroleum meet requirements for
100% operations. It starts in the laboratory with specifications and
testable properties that we call fit-for-purpose.
To understand fit-for-purpose, you have to remember that all
of our aviation capability today was designed around petroleumbased liquid hydrocarbon fuel. Many of these aspects are so subtle
that they do not measure them on a day-to-day basis and we have
not included them in our specifications, but they are still important
to our aircraft. That is what fit-for-purpose means. Once we get out
of the laboratory—today’s laboratory tests probably measure some
50–60 different properties related to fuel performance—we go
into performance similarity. Do the materials react the same way,
do the propulsion systems react the same way, and do the auxiliary
power units and the fuel distribution systems react the same way?
That is the next level of testing.
Once we have satisfied that point, we look at the operational
weapon system. Do the aircraft, whether fixed-wing or helicopters, fly exactly the same with these fuels? Again, we have to
meet the requirements of the operational community. We have
to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that when we change
our specification to add a new source of fuel, that that fuel will
operate 100% guaranteed, as petroleum has for decades in the
past. At the last point in the game, after we have proven that the
operational weapon systems work, we get into long-term operability and durability issues. When we start running for hundreds
of hours, do we find any differences that our earlier tests may
have missed?
In the Navy, we call this process a standard work package.
Basically it is our recipe for how to test and approve a fuel. Granted,
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they are works in progress, they are constantly changing, and they
are constantly being modified as we learn more and more about
these fuels, but they are doing the job in providing a systematic,
dedicated approach to proving 100% compatibility.
Where do we stand today? Hydro-treated renewable fuels
have been through the laboratory and they have been through
component and propulsion system tests for naval aircraft. And we
have made the proof of concept by flying successfully two different aircraft—the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, also known as the
Green Hornet, and the MH-60 helicopter. In the case of the Super
Hornet, we flew 16 flights lasting a total of 17 flight hours across
the entire flight envelope of that aircraft. At the conclusion of the
flight test program, Lieutenant Commander Tom Weaver, our lead
pilot, basically said that he could not tell the difference in the fuel
(Figure 5).
Figure 5. Flight Tests: Demonstrating Operational Equivalence
About 6 months later, we tried the 50/50 fuel in our helicopter
community. Although we did not accomplish as many flights, the
impact was the same. We know we have success when the operator community tells us things are looking good and that they do
not see any difference. That is the challenge; that is the goal of the
alternate fuels program for aviation.
Where are we going from here? We have a number of demos
lined up over the next year looking at different parts of the fuel
system and different propulsion systems—old and new (Figure 6).
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We intend to get buy-in in different communities, including those
associated with the MQ-8B Fire Scout unmanned system. Again,
we are trying to build confidence by demonstrating that the fuels
that pass our laboratory tests actually work in operational conditions. All of this is leading up to changing our specifications and
moving to the Carrier Strike Group demonstration in 2012.
Figure 6. 50/50 Hydrotreated Renewable JP-5 (HRJ5) Flight
Demonstration Plan
Still, 8 million barrels of fuel is a lot of fuel and 10 years is a
short period of time. In our view, hydro-treated renewable sources
are part of the answer. However, people have come up with a
lot of great ideas for making fuel from things that we have never
thought of. Some of the pathways we are just looking at are synthetic biology, alcohol oligomerization, and pyrolysis technologies
that are being developed today (Figure 7). We may well want to
look at some of these technologies in the future, with the idea of
increasing the supply pool of fuels and reducing our dependence
on petroleum. The fact that many of these fuels will be more environmentally friendly than using petroleum will help ensure that at
the end of the day, we meet the Secretary’s goals for energy, security, and environmental stewardship.
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Figure 7. Potential Future Fuels