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130 comments on DrumBeat: May 19, 2006

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TI on May 19, 2006 - 3:24pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
You can produce fuels with EROEI less than one, ie. with negative primary energy gain. It has been done in reality - in the Soviet Union and North Korea. Do you really want that? It is not the money, but the energy.

Producing synthetic fuels (os mining coal or pumping oil) at EROEI one is in essence transforming one energy form to another. That's OK in principle. But Peak Oil means also diminishng energy supply - not only diminishing supply of one energy form. The lost energy must be compensated by producing more of some other kind of energy - coal, natural gas, nuclear etc. If you can do that you can then transform it to liquid fuels. If the transformation takes more energy than it gives, you must produce still some more energy to compensate that.

This has been discussed here already earlier. If we have to compensate the energy lost by a 10% decrease in the oil supply by coal, the US coal production has to grow a lot, may be 20% - 30% (oil is more energy intensive than coal). If you have to convert coal to gasoline, it takes energy and so more coal to provide that. So increase the coal production still some more. Now the US coal production grew 1.9% in 2005.

Tar sands and extra heavy oil are like coal. You must increase the production immensely to gain the necessary net energy.

Profitability is not the issue. You can have fat government subsidies and tax deductions - the Soviet government did just that. So they got more coal with a very low EROEI. They argued just like Neuroil and thought that it didn't matter as long they got their coal. But it did matter. Producing that coal just ate away other energy resources. They tried to beat the EROEI - but it took them.

In fact the Americans could easily do with much less gasoline than  they use today. People naturally think how awkward it would to live now driving considerably less - with everybody else driving like before and the social and urban structure being like today. But as soon as everybody has to drive less the necessary changes start. They start absolutely. Then everybody wants public transport - and it will come. They don't need it now, so just wait.

But everything will go smoother if there are people how know what to do. People who can tell not to panic and try to commit EROEI suicide or start new wars to get the oil,  but arrange things better in the new conditions. I think here is enough to do.  

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neuroil on May 22, 2006 - 10:32am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Hi TI,

I just want to make clear that I agree with most (if not all) of what you write, at least with your global conclusions.

My considerations about the EROEI parameter just tried to show that it is not always very well defined (or in fact computed differently by various authors).

  1. In fact some consider the energy invested as the total amount of energy requirements for a certain process, regardless of the source. In that cas you have to compute the total value of energy inputs (X BTU's in primary source, Y BTU's of electricity, Z BTU's of fuel and other energy sources) and compare this to the N BTU's of the final energy source. So EROEI would be (X+Y+Z)/N. This value can also be viewed as the ratio of energy recieved versus energy dissipated.

  2. Others only want to consider the energy from other sources you have to "import" in order to make your reactions work. In this setting, EROEI is (Y+Z)/N, Y,Z,N beeing as in 1.

I think both values are important. Of course we all agree that if EROEI in the second case is <1 then our process doesn't work at all, neither thermodynamically nor economically, unless you have a cheap largely available energy source (which don't have any more). I think your answer refered to EROEI in this setting.

But take the example of XTL as discussed by Rober Rapier. In this case the energy for the reactions comes most predominantly from the primary source, in fact 85% in the case of coal. Only 15% of the energy requirements stem from other sources, 10% from electricity, 5% for mining and transporting coal, in the case of an in-situ fischer-tropsch plant. I this case, EROEI as computed in my second example, is largely >1 but this number is misleading as the reactions still dissipate a lot of energy because of the waste of the primary energy source. Some of this energy dissipated could be used for the generation of electricity but the waste is still huge. This accounts also for the high CO2 emissions of the process. The EROEI as computed in my first example is <1. You can however get more fuel from this process than you input.

In order for CTL and XTL to work, for some time at least, we should experience a very slow decline of oil production in the coming years. It seems that these techniques are very expensive. The construction of plants will exceed the price of a refinery. Operation requires a lot of catalyst, price of which is increasing, a lot of brain-power (price of which decreases :(  ), and heavy maintainance. To bring these plant up, economy should be working fine in order for these heavy investments to be made. The environmental toll will probably be disastrous. If oil declines faster, I think we won't ever be able to bring these techniques to work.

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130 comments on DrumBeat: May 19, 2006

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