The Oil Drum | The End of Exploration?

36 comments on The End of Exploration?

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neuroil on January 11, 2006 - 8:54am

Well, as far as I know, EROEI of ethanol is actually less than 1. Don't forget that growing any product requires a lot of energy not only in the form of mechanical energy (working the soils, seeding, harvesting, transportation, transformation), but also in the form of chemical energy because the fertilizers and pesticides are made from oil. With the best techniques not even yet available, EROEI barely reaches 1,2 or max 2 which is really very difficult to achieve. Will this be sustainable ?

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joule on January 11, 2006 - 10:26am

The USDA report on ethanol previously cited here concluded that the ethanol-from-corn scheme has an EROEI of 1.34. While at least this is above unity, it is hardly anything to pop champagne corks over.

An EROEI of 1.34 essentially means that 3 units of energy goes into one end of the 'black box' and 4 units of energy comes out the other end. Thus, in a sense, you have 3 units of energy just going around in a circle doing nothing. However, the greater the size of this wheel spinning, the more capital investment is required, so the whole thing is still rather unattractive from an energy (as opposed to financial) standpoint.

And as creg rightly indicated in his post above, soil depletion is an issue which is vitally important but which doesn't get much attention. Our factory farms are already stressing our soil resources badly enough without making it worse by increasing corn production to make ethanol.

Even if the ethanol-from-corn route managed to increase its EROEI to 2, I couldn't get enthused about it. It is just fundamentally a bad idea and poor use of precious resources.

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36 comments on The End of Exploration?

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