RE: Natural gas: The fracking fallacy

Sat, 03 Jan 2015 18:56:58 -0800 

 

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2015 5:31 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Natural gas: The fracking fallacy

 

On 1/3/2015 1:29 PM, John Clark wrote:

 

 

On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 10:23 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List 
<[email protected]> wrote

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

 

>I go to Wikipedia quite a bit myself but

 

Oh yes, I knew there would be a "but".

> when big money depends on some numbers looking good

 

Or when Wikipedia is not in sync with your scientific ignorance and says 
something that you wish were not true. Apparently you believe that if you wish 
hard enough that something is not true it isn't. 

 > Wikipedia is open to corruption

 

But only when Wikipedia says something that you wish were not true. We 
shouldn't trust Wikipedia but we should trust Chris de Morsella even when he 
has absolutely nothing to back up his claims.

 

>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.

 

OF COURSE IT'S WRONG YOU BRAINLESS TWIT, only a fool would count light that you 
didn't pay for as energy invested, but you are a fool and so you do count the 
self-energy of the kerogen,  energy that you didn't pay for, as energy invested 
when figuring out the EROI to convert kerogen to oil.  So  why the 
inconsistency, why not use the same imbecilic method for solar cells that you 
use for kerogen? Could it possibly be because you like solar cells but don't 
like kerogen? Nah, I'm sure that was just a coincidence. 

> The process of producing oil (+gas) from shale rock containing kerogen 
> requires huge energy inputs in order to cook all of that rock!

 

Yes and a large part of that energy comes from the chemical energy of the 
kerogen itself that is released as heat. Of course that means that the chemical 
energy in a pound of kerogen is greater than the chemical energy in the crude 
oil that the pound of kerogen produced, and a pound of crude oil has more 
chemical energy than the refined  gasoline that came from that pound of crude 
oil, but given that  the law of conservation of energy is what it is a educated 
person, a smart person, and a honest person wouldn't expect anything else. 

 

> EROI is ONLY measuring the ratio of the *measurable energy* inputs required 
> to produce the energy yield

 

Like the *measurable* amount of solar energy falling on a solar cell. 

 

>to the *energy value* contained in the resultant yielded product.

If that is the correct way to calculate EROI, and assuming you think the first 
law of thermodynamics is valid please explain how the  EROI of ANYTHING is EVER 
greater than 1. Perhaps I shouldn't have made that assumption, do you believe 
the law of conservation of energy is wrong, Wikipedia says it's correct but you 
say they don't know anything. 


The difference is that if you treat kerogen as a primary energy source it takes 
energy to get it, unlike sunlight.  So if it takes two units of kerogen to 
produce enough energy to get one unit of kerogen you can't sustain extraction 
of kerogen.  You can keep extracting it using some other source of oil or 
nuclear power or photovoltaics, but you can't do it just using kerogen.  So my 
understanding of EROI is
    EROI = (Usable energy out)/(Total energy used to produce it)

It doesn't matter to the EROI where the denominator comes from, but it matters 
in the sustainability of the source as primary energy.  One may well choose to 
expend more energy than you get out because the form of energy out makes it 
more suitable - that's why we extract avgas from crude, but you can't do that 
as a primary energy source.

 

Agreed – and much earlier on in this interminable argument with Mr. Clark I 
mentioned this very consideration with regards to producing oil from kerogen – 
that because liquid fuels have such an energy premium – above beyond just the 
raw chemical energy potential they contain – because they are a highly 
concentrated and portable store of energy. This becomes an  especially 
important consideration in the transportation sector.

Because of this it sometimes may make economic sense to invest more energy into 
some potential resource than can be produced from the resulting yield because 
the quality of the yielded energy may be significantly more valuable than the 
quality of the energy source invested into producing the output. 

With Kerogen production – it is possible to argue that if the processing heat 
can be provided by a poor resource (coal for example) – then the resulting 
value of the yielded oil may make sense.

Economic sense perhaps, but not environmental sense. In fact the carbon 
footprint of that oil would be very high indeed. Something similar is now going 
on in the tar sand deposits of Alberta Canada – a lot of processing energy is 
going into the production process (natural gas and such) in order to cook the 
oil (+gas) out of the tar sands. It may make economic sense for the tar sands 
operators to do this, but the product they produce has – off the top of my head 
something like twice the carbon footprint as traditionally produced oil does.

-Chris

Brent

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