The U.S. Army Engineering and Support Center, Huntsville provides vital maintenance and repair services to the Department of Defense and other government agencies to sustain a worldwide robust fueling capability in support of the Army, Navy and Air Force service components.
Purpose
In 1980, the Defense Logistics Agency approached Huntsville Center to acquire contracts for the creation of Operations and Maintenance manuals for their Defense Energy Support Center Fuel Support Point, now the Defense Fuel Support Point - DFSP, coastal fuel sites. Due to the success of this effort, DLA requested Huntsville Center develop a recurring maintenance and service order program. The Fuels Program’s purpose is to provide recurring maintenance to maintain the capital investment and repairs with emergency response to sustain the operational readiness of petroleum facilities.
Program and Project Management
Huntsville Center’s Fuels Program, within the Installation Support and Programs Management Directorate, has the expertise and ability to assist multi-service installations and customers in maintaining and repairing fueling equipment at the installation level. The program is managed by separate project management teams for each military service. The preventive and periodic maintenance is executed in a decentralized manner with each DOD installation providing a site representative, who is responsible for validating the scope of work and subsequent verification of work completion. Huntsville Center provides additional quality assurance via the use of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers district field offices and periodic quality assurance visits as added checks and balances.
Program Scope
The Fuels Program provides maintenance, inspections, repairs and emergency response actions for DLA capitalized petroleum facilities, other DOD activities and other federal activities on military installations worldwide, in compliance with federal, state and local code, criteria and regulations.The program includes 431 sites across the world providing preventive and corrective maintenance for DLA-Energy and the Service Components. The program reached full operational capability in October 2017 with the last remaining Air Force award. This program also maintains the Marine Loading Arms at 19 sites worldwide for all military services through DLA-Energy. MLAs are critical in issuing and receiving fuel and directly support the U.S. Navy Fleet and allies around the globe.
In FY 24, the program obligated in excess of $376 million, the largest in the history of the program. The program provided over 2,200 critical and timely preventive maintenance visits to maintain the capital investment and completed over 5,700 corrective maintenance (service orders) visits with a placement value of $196 million to maintain equipment operational readiness with an execution rate of 89%.
To assist the military services and DLA-E in returning DLA capitalized sites back to operation following a natural disaster, a fuels response team was initiated. This team stood up for the first time to assist fuel sites post Hurricane Irma. The Fuels Incident Response Team consisted of a five-person fuel assessment team from Omaha and a two-person team from Huntsville Center comprised of a Service Order Administrator with a $175,000 warrant and a safety engineer to provide on-the-ground service order approvals to increase response time and shorten repair times.
The DLA-Energy Acquisition Plan began by using a SATOC contractor to provide recurring maintenance and minor repair support to the installations. As the program quickly grew, it was evident that competition needed to be introduced to provide the best value to the government. As such, Huntsville Center determined a Basic Ordering Agreement would better fulfill the requirements. In FY18, the program transitioned from the BOAs to GSA Multiple Award Schedule. In October 2024, the program started market research to begin transitioning to other contracts. These new contracts will bridge between the GSA MAS and a MATOC.