Navy ships to run on bacon fat … and more

US Navy Secretary Ray Mabus ordered 450,000 gallons of biofuel from Dynamic Fuels, LLC and Solazyme. Dynamic Fuels is a 50-50 joint venture between Tyson Foods and Syntroleum Corporation, and Solazyme is a West Coast producer of algae-based fuel. The bulk of the fuel will come from Dynamic Fuels and will be used to power Navy ships while the Solazyme fuel will power aircraft during a maritime demonstration in the Pacific, which is held every other year. Dynamic Fuels was first reported in Tech Flash on July 25, 2008, and again on July 27, 2010. Dynamic Fuels converts fats including beef tallow, pork lard, chicken fat and greases into diesel fuel.

“This fuel purchase furthers President Obama’s goal to achieve more energy security by finding ways to lessen our dependence on foreign oil and fossil fuels,” says Mabus. “As part of this goal, in March of 2011, the President directed the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Energy and the Department of the Navy to come up with a domestic biofuels industry capable of producing drop-in substitutes in a geographically dispersed national way and to be a competitive biofuel industry.”