RE: Natural gas: The fracking fallacy

Fri, 02 Jan 2015 19:24:07 -0800 

 

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Friday, January 02, 2015 5:34 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Natural gas: The fracking fallacy

 

 

On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 6:01 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List 
<[email protected]> wrote:

 

> I give you the definition as it is defined in Wikipedia

 

But I thought Wikipedia was consistently wrong about everything and only used 
by shallow people like me. 

 

I go to Wikipedia quite a bit myself, and over time have come to understand 
that because of the process by which Wiki entries are edited and re-edited that 
for subjects that have HUGE money, religious or political interests tied up in 
them that it pays to take it with a grain of salt. On the other hand for less 
controversial subjects it is a great resource. If I need to look up the mass of 
Jupiter I am sure Wikipedia is as good as any place else.

But when big money depends on some numbers looking good an open source editing 
process such as Wikipedia is open to corruption by concerted small groups of 
people desiring to influence – by editing – and commenting on – a Wiki entry.

For shale oil data I try to as much as possible get the raw data sets, such as 
county (or preferably well) level production numbers. The aggregate numbers 
published by the EIA and the IEA and hyped by the shale boosters are wildly 
optimistic – both in mine and many others opinion. I know and have long 
corresponded with researchers who are delving into the raw data. If you want 
the real picture go find the raw data and graph it.

 

> 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.

 

Fine,  you did not have to expend any energy for sunlight to fall on a solar 
cell , 

 

Pleased to see you just admitted you were wrong – and not just wrong in the 
mere sense of transposing a number or getting some fact wrong, but wrong in the 
sense of having erred because of a fundamentally poor grasp of the subject 
matter. 

You were wrong in trying to maintain that because the efficiency of a solar 
cell is around 20% then the 80% of incident solar energy that the cell was not 
able to capture must therefore be counted as ENERGY INVESTED. That is not just 
factually wrong John, it demonstrates a shallow understanding of what EROI is 
measuring versus what it is NOT measuring.

 

and you did not have to expend any energy to obtain the self energy of the 
kerogen to help you convert itself to oil, 

 

Dude wrong again! The energy POTENTIAL contained within the wax like kerogen 
that is itself scattered about in micro-scale deposits in the massive shale 
rock matrix does not somehow magically materialize for FREE without effort. 
Great effort must be expended in order to extract the energy potential of this 
resource. The shale rock itself needs to be cooked for many weeks at 350 
degrees C. In what universe is that free?

The fact that – post facto after the potential energy of a portion of the 
resource has been extracted that a great portion (more than half) must be used, 
e.g. re-invested (note the word invested) back into the processing of 
additional raw resource. This is not free John. A lot of work has gone into 
getting the oil (+gas) cooked out of the rock. To burn the oil to make 
processing heat would be economically insane when one could instead burn much 
less valuable coal (liquid fuels have premium value as an energy store)… that 
oil is NOT free John it has market value. 

The gas produced is a less valuable commodity – as all gas is for that matter 
(often still just burnt off into the air at the wellhead) – because it needs a 
pipeline infrastructure that probably does not exist where the kerogen bearing 
shale resource is located. Because of this it may make ECONOMIC sense to burn 
some or even all of this gas to produce some of the required processing heat, 
but this is still ENERGY that is BEING INVESTED!

 

 

you get it for free. And by the way, did you know that with multicrystalline 
silicon solar cells, the most common type used today, it takes 4 years for them 
to produce more energy than it took to manufacture them? 

 

And did you know that those energy inputs you speak of that are required in 
order to produce the polysilicon for the PV cells ARE IN FACT factored in to 
solar EROI ratios. So what is your point?
 

 > 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

 

If so then the EROI for EVERYTHING is ALWAYS less than one, every process is a 
energy sink and nothing is worth doing and the only thing we can do is what 
environmentalists have always said we should do, freeze to death in the dark.   

EROI is ONLY measuring the ratio of the *measurable energy* inputs required to 
produce the energy yield to the *energy value* contained in the resultant 
yielded product. That is all. Stop trying to misdirect the meaning of EROI 
which most definitely is not trying to measure entropy… so your yadda yadda 
about all processes being less than thermodynamically perfect is mere useless 
noise in this case… intended to misdirect and make you sound knowledgeable.

> EROI measures the ratio of ALL required energy inputs with what is actually 
> produced.

 

Then the first law of thermodynamics guarantees that the EROI of every process 
can never be greater than 1, and the second law of thermodynamics guarantees 
that the EROI of every process must always be less than 1. 

 

Again you go on in some parallel universe having redefined the meaning of EROI 
radically away from what EROI is accepted to mean. I don’t care about how 
ultimately entropy prevails when the subject matter is about a handy derived 
ratio to attempt to measure the relative net return of different processes and 
different energy sources (or stores). Kindly try to use EROI as it is intended 
to be used and for what it is intended to measure.

 

> You really don’t get it!

 

I might "get it" someday, the day I get Alzheimer's disease.

 

That would really mess up with your plans for eternal preservation. Imagine 
that your Alzheimer riddled brain preserved forever…. An amusing thought for 
me… so thanks for that little word trigger John.

You don’t get it right now and have proved your shallowness of understanding 
again and again. 

 

> 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.

 

Then EROI is utterly useless because the only thing a business man or anyone 
else with half a brain is interested in is energy that is available minus all 
the energy THAT YOU PAYED FOR to obtain that energy.

You would have to be a fucking idiot to burn valuable liquid fuel in order to 
produce processing heat when you could put that oil on rail cars or in a 
pipeline and sell it for the prevailing global spot price for crude oil. And 
then use a portion of the proceeds resulting from the sale to purchase cheap 
brown coal from the powder river basin in Wyoming and burn THAT for your 
processing heat. 

The extracted oil is not FREE – it has MARKET VALUE nincompoop. The businessman 
with a brain will sell that very valuable oil the idiot businessman would 
instead burn it for processing heat because as Mr. genius John said, the oil 
producer did not actually purchase the oil they produced from the market… so 
therefore it is free. 

How stupid can you get John… you are really on a roll here… keep it up; your 
pompous delivery makes it all the more pleasurable to point out – time after 
time – the utter lack of understanding you display on energy matters. 

Oil is a valuable and marketable product that is worth much more than the 
processing heat it contains. They would laugh you right out of Houston John, 
and keep laughing you all the way out of Texas too.

 

> 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

 

Holy cow, there you have it right there! 

And right here -- you demonstrate that you are still too dense (or 
intellectually dishonest) to get the well understood meaning of “Energy 
Invested” as used in EROI. Your continued claim that it somehow means: “energy 
Purchased on the market” betrays your fundamental ignorance of what it is that 
EROI is measuring. 

If energy needs to be put into some process – or crucially as well, is embedded 
into the required capital that is itself necessary to produce some energy 
resource – then this is energy invested into the process or energy system being 
measured. It does not matter, for the EROI number where this “energy” source 
is.. it does not matter from what energy bank it has been withdrawn from. EROI 
IS NOT measuring where energy inputs are derived from! Stop trying to radically 
re-define its meaning.

The process of producing oil (+gas) from shale rock containing kerogen requires 
huge energy inputs in order to cook all of that rock! The dismally poor EROI 
numbers reflect the energy intensive nature of its extraction and the very low 
net energy yield it offers vis a vis other much more promising energy systems – 
such as say the solar or wind.

 

To tell the truth for a time  I was having second thoughts and feeling a little 
guilty thinking that maybe I was being too hard on you; I was thinking that you 
couldn't passably be as dumb as you seemed to be and so maybe I was just 
misunderstanding what you were trying to say. But you're above statement is as 
clear as it is imbecilic and so I must conclude that my first impression was 
correct, you really are too dumb to walk and chew gum at the same time.  

 

My dear fellow, you are quite the pompous ass and excel at being obnoxious… any 
other hidden talents, you arrogant twat?

-Chris

 John K Clark

 

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