On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List < [email protected]> wrote:
> If 50% of the oil in a reserve must be consumed in order to extract the > remaining net energy then tell me why should it not be counted as energy > invested? > Because the last I in EROI stands for "Investment", and so you should only include energy that you actually had to pay for. If 80% of the energy falling on a solar cell is wasted (and it is) then should that be counted as energy invested? If you insist on going down that road then the EROI number will ALWAYS be less than 1 because the conservation of energy says you can't get energy from nothing and the second law of thermodynamics says you can't even break even. > > You invented the term “self-energy” If so then Wikipedia is using my term: "A 1984 study estimated the EROEI of the various known oil-shale deposits as varying between 0.7–13.3. More recent studies estimates the EROEI of oil shales to be 2:1 or 16:1 *depending on whether self-energy is counted as a cost or internal energy is excluded and only purchased energy is counted as input."* The environmental lobbyists over at The Western Resource Advocates are also using my term: "Oil shale’s Energy Return on Investment (EROI) is extremely low, falling between 1:1 and 2:1 when* self-energy—the energy released by the oil shale conversion process that is used to power that operation—is counted as a cost."* A hell of a lot of other people are using my term too, a Google search for self-energy and kerogen oil shale gives 15,100 results. > > There is also an environmental cost of burning all this carbon fossil > fuel in the extraction process > That is a different issue and might or might not be a good reason for not turning to kerogen, but even if you think it would cause too much environmental damage it would be dishonest to generate phoney EROI numbers to try to get people not to use it. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
