(July 19, 2010) Washington - Surprise, surprise.  Despite the claims of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and California Air Resources Board (CARB), the production and use of petroleum fuels does generate indirect greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions…and they are potentially large.

A paper to be published tomorrow in Environment Magazine found that the military activities related to acquiring and protecting oil imports from the Middle East generate significant GHG emissions that have, so far, been unaccounted for in fuel and climate regulations such as EPA’s Renewable Fuels Standard and CARB’s Low Carbon Fuels Standard.

In the paper (“Securing Foreign Oil: A Case for Including Military Operations in the Climate Change Impact of Fuels”), University of Nebraska Professors Adam Liska and Richard Perrin write, “…military activity to protect international oil trade is a direct production component for importing foreign oil—as necessary for imports as are pipelines and supertankers—and therefore the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from that military activity are relevant to U.S. fuel policies related to climate change.”

Renewable Fuels Association President Bob Dinneen said the paper represents a groundbreaking development in the study of indirect GHG emissions. “This is a landmark study in that it is the first rigorously researched and published estimate of one source of indirect emissions for oil,” Dinneen said. “To date, the debate over indirect emissions has been narrowly focused only on biofuels and the concept of land use change. In recently enacted regulations, EPA and CARB have assumed petroleum and other fuels incur no indirect emissions, which this paper demonstrates is completely erroneous. This study underscores that all fuels have indirect effects, a point we have been arguing for several years now.”

Using previously published estimates of the fraction of military expenditures attributable to securing oil supplies, the authors found that defense of oil imports from the Middle East incurs a significant GHG cost. The authors write, “Overall military emissions associated with gasoline from the Middle East are then found to range from 8.1 to 18.2 g CO2e per MJ, with attributional military security alone at the low end to attributional military security and the Iraq War at the high end; the consequential approach to military security emissions alone is 17.5 g CO2e per MJ. It should also be noted that as petroleum imports decline, the intensity of these emissions would increase if expenditures for military security were to remain constant.”

Notably, the estimate of 8.1 to 18.2 g/MJ is similar to the most recent published estimate of theoretical indirect land use change emissions tied to corn ethanol expansion. In April, authors from Purdue University estimated corn ethanol ILUC emissions to be 13.9 g/MJ.

Dinneen noted that this is just one possible indirect emissions source tied to oil. Just last week, members of CARB’s expert work group showed preliminary data suggesting indirect GHG emissions related to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico could be an additional 3.9 g/MJ.