Carbon reduction is not the U.S. military’s real goal. Instead the defense department’s main motivation in pursuing biofuels is to reduce its dependence on foreign oil. In particular, the Pentagon wants to make it easier to supply troops in foreign battle zones and distant military outposts—right now, the military has to ship fuel to Iraq and to its bases in Hawaii. “One of the things we’re looking at is being able to make smaller scale production facilities that might be able to travel with some of the troops,” says Douglas Kirkpatrick, biofuels program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Source: IEEE Spectrum.