RE: Natural gas: The fracking fallacy

Fri, 02 Jan 2015 15:02:12 -0800 

 

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Friday, January 02, 2015 1:29 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Natural gas: The fracking fallacy

 

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.

 

WRONG! Once again you are mistaken, and demonstrate a superficial familiarity 
with EROI and the NET produced available resulting energy that this ratio 
attempts to measure. For your education I give you the definition as it is 
defined in Wikipedia – [yeah I can use the Google machine as well as you can, 
John]

 

In  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics> physics,  
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_economics> energy economics and  
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energetics> ecological energetics, energy 
returned on energy invested (EROEI or ERoEI); or energy return on investment 
(EROI), is the  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratio> ratio of the amount of 
usable  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy> energy acquired from a particular 
energy resource to the amount of energy expended to obtain that energy 
resource. 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested#cite_note-mh2010-1>
 [1] 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested#cite_note-eo-2>
 [2] When the EROEI of a resource is less than or equal to one, that energy 
source becomes an "energy sink", and can no longer be used as a  
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_energy> primary source of energy.

 

Nowhere in this definition does it mention self-energy or indicate that 
so-called self-energy should not be counted as energy invested when calculating 
EROI. 

 

Energy invested stands  precisely that e.g. for energy invested – NOT just 
energy invested that had to be purchased from some other [fossil] energy 
producing source on the market place. If a process requires a given energy 
input in order to work then this is energy invested – whether or not it was 
purchased on the market or removed from the available NET ENERGY that is 
produced.

 

>>If 80% of the energy falling on a solar cell is wasted (and it is) then 
>>should that be counted as energy invested?

 

Once again your ignorance literally shines through John [and yes the pun was 
intended]. 

In exactly the same way that oil, gas  or coal left in the ground – after all 
extractable resources have been removed -- is not counted as energy invested – 
even though it is not recovered energy… so it is with incident solar energy 
that is not recovered. It is non-captured energy in both cases, but it is NOT 
energy invested in order to produce the NET energy actually delivered. 

I feel like I am explaining EROI to a small child John – do I really have to 
educate you on this?

 

By the way your 80% of incident solar energy not being recovered by PV is 
changing fast. Already in the laboratory yields for solar PV have reached 40%. 
You might as well begin getting used to it John – the future is going to be 
dominated by renewable energy harvesting systems such as wind and solar.

 

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 really don’t get it! 

EROI measures the NET energy that is available from a produced resource after 
all of the required energy inputs, needed in order to produce a yield form the 
given resource, have been subtracted from the actual energy that has  been 
yielded by the process.

The 1rst and the 2nd law of thermodynamics are tangential and essentially 
irrelevant. EROI instead specifically measures the ratio of the NET output 
energy left after all the energy inputs (and the embedded energy contained in 
the capital and other non-energy resources have been accounted for).

 

> 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."

Counting only purchased energy is a way of obfuscating the very large and 
significant energy inputs that are required in order to produce any net result 
from kerogen shale (and tar sands as well for example). It is a form of lying 
with numbers. The energy burnt (which produces massive CO2 pollution) is 
consumed – it is invested into the process.

Anyone who is using the term self-energy is doing so because they are trying to 
obscure the low net yield of a process by pretending that all of the produced 
energy that must be immediately consumed in the process of production in order 
to produce a NET yield is off the books.

What kind of crooked accounting is that?


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.  

It is the EROI numbers you cite that are phony EROI numbers John, because they 
exclude almost  all of the energy invested into the production process by 
calling it “self-energy”. 

EROI measures the ratio of ALL required energy inputs with what is actually 
produced. You cannot take required energy inputs off book by calling them 
self-energy. Now clearly this may have an economic implication for a production 
process  – in that say the cooked gas recovered from a retort oven which is 
baking kerogen bearing shale in order to produce the net yield. 

No arguments that for some processes (but not for others – namely the in-situ 
process favored by Shell Oil in their now abandoned kerogen project) it may 
make sense for a portion of the input energy to be taken out from the stream of 
yielded energy – but that is a decision of how to allocate capital and resource 
inputs. 

You don’t get to take it off book and NOT count it as required Energy Input. If 
you cannot produce without it then it must be counted as energy invested.

Please John, stop embarrassing yourself… don’t take it from me, please read the 
seminal work on EROI done by Charles Hall, considered the originator of the 
term. 

-Chris

  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.

-- 
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.

Reply via email to