Insane Military Fuel Consumption
Invading countries for oil while consuming billions of gallons of it is not only criminally wasteful and polluting, but it’s downright arrogant and insane. True, the oil companies are gouging us like there’s no tomorrow. At the rate prices are rising, we could be paying close to $10 per gallon for gasoline by the end of the summer! (Earlier this month, Goldman Sachs forecast oil prices to jump to $141 a barrel from $107 and said prices could spike as high as $200 a barrel.) But military fuel consumption is out of control. It’s obscene how the Pentagon fuels up as it increasing quantities of fuel to carry on its wars.
In April The Defense Energy Support Center, which acts as the military’s primary broker for fuel, released these statistics about military fuel consumption. DESC currently has contracts with the International Oil Trading Company based in Boca Raton, Fla.; Kuwait Petroleum Corporation and Petrol Ofisi, Golteks and Tefirom, each of Turkey.
- Contracts with these companies range from $1.99 a gallon to $5.30 a gallon.
- DESC sets fuel rates paid by military units. Currently, prices are $3.51 a gallon for diesel, $3.15 for gasoline and $3.04 for jet fuel. Avgas, a high-octane fuel used mostly in unmanned aerial vehicles, is sold for $13.61 a gallon.
- The military consumes about 1.2 million barrels of fuel each month in Iraq at $127.68 a barrel, a price that reflects crude oil refined into usable fuel.
- The U.S. consumes about 21 million of the 86 million barrels of oil per day demanded on the global market. While the Defense Department is as the nation’s single largest user of energy, its 1.6 million gallons a day in Iraq is small relative to the total market.
- In World War II, the average fuel consumption per service member was about 1.67 gallons a day. In Iraq, it’s 27.3 gallons.
- If the average price of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel is about $3.23, each service member in Iraq is burning about $88 a day.
- While the majority of fuel consumption is by the military’s fleet of planes and helicopters, ground vehicles, too, are notoriously reliant. In general, the Abrams tank, the largest and heaviest of the Army’s vehicles, consumes 2 gallons for every mile, while the Bradley fighting vehicle gets a little more than one mile per gallon. The new Mine-Resistant Armored Protective vehicles get less than six miles per gallon. Heavily armoring Humvees has reduced their fuel mileage from about 10 mpg to four. (Manufacturers caution that estimates can vary substantially depending on how the vehicle is used.)
Update July 11: The DOD has released an Amended list of fuel prices “to adjust for market fluctuations” as of July 1 (.pdf)
