 | Olduvai 2008 movie | The Oil Drum: Europe | Why wind needs feed-in tariffs (and why it is not the enemy of nuclear) |  |
User login
Personnel
Editors
Contributors
Peak Oil Primers
Archives
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
Vital Trivia
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
Follow up to Davidyson comment from previous thread on
syncrude EROEI:
1 barrel of crude oil = 5.8 MBtu
1 cubic feet of natural gas = 1020 Btu
1400 cubic feet of natural gas = 1.43 MBtu
5.8:1.43 gives 4.1:1 EROEI (with only natgas input)
From http://sustainability.syncrude.ca/sustainability2004/environment_health_...
Energy Efficiency and Climate Change
Syncrude did not meet its target for energy efficiency in 2004. Performance was 1.35 million
BTUs per barrel of oil produced versus the target of 1.26. Contributing factors included
higher than expected natural gas consumption at the Aurora mine due to the start-up of
Auroras second production train, lower than planned bitumen recovery and high energy
consumption caused by unplanned outages of major production equipment.
Mr Troll, if correct, your analysis is helpful. Very narrow bound gives a maximum eroei that also demonstrates exposure to resiliance. Taking into account embedded energy in infrastructure and transportation costs etc may reduce the 4.1 significantly?
This chart I posted the other day shows the utter futility of pursuing these low eroei energy sources - tar sands and biofuels - since we are simply pissing away vast amounts of energy in pursuit of that receding horizon.
These activities are being pursued to extend the life of our ICE based auto fleet - and here in lies the real danger. Every year that passes is one year less to start replacing this fleet with electric vehicles.
Syncrude and biofuels are merely sticking plasters on a ruptured aorta.
Power generation from coal generated by mine mouth power plants is more efficient in terms of BTU's per euro than oil, natural gas, or syncrude. Much of the world is inhibited by carbon taxes and lack of domestic coal from realizing the tremendous monetary advantages of having and using coal. There is a major problem in switching to electric cars. You might cause brown outs, black outs, rolling blackouts, days without electricity etc. There are problems in growth areas with existing electrical infrastructure becoming insufficient and a need to put more power producing facilities online while building more transmission lines. Like the previous call for biodiesel, ethanol, and cellulosic ethanol; the switch to electric cars is lacks forsight. You simply do not have the infrastructre to sustain a major switch in many parts of the world. One may see the current inefficiency of syncrude in EROEI compared to light onshore crude and new conventional gas fields, yet the advantage of syncrude is expected to shift in time as the older oil fields give out, smaller new fields give out, and shipyards cannot build enough semi-subs or floaters. The FSPO demand is expected to put additional cost factors on the EROEI deepwater equation. How many barrels of oil/tons of coal were consumed in manufacturing a floating storage and production tanker?
may i suggest one reads Shai Agassi's blog (http://shaiagassi.typepad.com/)
here we see someone who has gathered $200mln in seed capital, full cooporation of the Israel gov't and the Renault Nissan's CEO promise to deliver EV's (Megane sedan) in 3 yrs, with CSP as the electricity source of choice
nowadays he's visiting other countries to follow Israel in an open source / franchise model
as i see it, this approach works well enough to get started; he wouldn't have come this far when the obvious issues like grid capacity couldn't be addressed
the EU would be in for quite a ride when curiousity would lead: http://www.eurotrib.com/comments/2008/3/1/165118/0209/2#2
Emil Möller
If I install a solar power system on my house I can run my electric car on that. Thereby reducing strain on public infrastructure. That is my plan, it will work for me, can it be applied in any way to "the big picture".
Euan,
Great way to illustrate the concept of eroei, but a quibble. Shouldn't the line intersect the x axis at eroei of 1 (break even, all energy used to produce energy), not 0?
Welaka - you are correct. However, the scale on this chart actually runs from 1 to 50. I've checked my spread sheet and there is no easy way to modify the chart.
One more time, since this is the heart of the anti ethanol and bio fuels debate:
EROEI is an invalid except when it compares like to like as in apples to apples. Different fuels have different characteristics. Oil is finite and when it is gone it can not be replaced. Comparing ethanol to oil is an invalid concept. Leaving out the price factor which is critical to resource allocation compounds the error since there is no way to compensate for the reduced energy in ethanol. The fantasy of finding another energy source with the density of oil is unrealistic except in the form of conservation.
Electric cars using the grid are not the solution since electricity, unless produced by wind or nuclear, has a lower EROEI, if you insist on using that fallacious argument, than ethanol. Most American electricity is not nuclear or wind. Electricity use compounds the inefficiency of fossil fuel conversion with a high price and limited availability on a mass scale, since I doubt the grid could handled electric cars when it is overloaded already during peak periods by heater use in the winter and air conditioning in the summer. I use LP gas as a back up to my corn stove. LP has become so expensive that electricity is now very comparable price wise. In the near future more people will be using electricity to heat single rooms with space heaters. The grid will not be able to support this and cars too.
My favorite solution is hybrid cars running on a mixture diesel and biodiesel or gasoline and ethanol. This should work for some time until until the steep drop of post Peak Oil sets in. There is no permanent sustainability solution just as there is no solution that makes our individual lives sustainable and avoids death.
Practical and Rainsong - I believe Chris Vernon once reported that the official UK position was that UK electricity supply would have to grow by 20% to accommodate a total electrification of transportation (I'm not 100% sure of my facts here).
You are right that burning coal in old generating plant at 30% efficiency and using that electricity in transportation makes little sense.
My current thinking is that all this old inefficient plant has to be shut in favor of multi fuel combined heat and power systems that are 90% efficient - using coal base load topped up with urban waste and bio mass.
This is not crazy because I believe the Danes have already done this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration
http://www.ambottawa.um.dk/NR/rdonlyres/C3F9F1D4-BEA9-4C29-A1FD-1D7CC861...
This system will produce 1/3 the CO2 and 3 times the power / energy for the same FF input.
We obviously cannot switch to electrical transportation - but at some point it is absolutely inevitable that we need to start phasing it in.
There is an order of magnitude difference in the electrical demands. depending upon the route taken for "Electrification of Transportation".
The Tube in London is not a major part of the electrical demand of London (certainly not even 10%, doubtful if 1%) but it is a major part of transportation in London.
High enough efficiency of electrified transportation is, in contradiction of practicals dictum, sustainable (if the rest of society can become sustainable).
Best Hopes for High Efficiency Electrified Transportation,
Alan
London Underground electricity consumption:
- no. 1 electricity consumer in the London area
- consumption c. 1.1 TWh p.a.
- accounts for c. 3.5% of the electricity consumed in City of London
Climate/energy performance per service unit:
- CO2 emissions/passenger kilometre: 68.9 g/km
- CO2 emissions avg. 0.47kg/passenger journey
- c. 150 Wh/passenger km
-
Ref:
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/environmental-report-2007.pdf
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/environmental-report-2006.pdf
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BQQ/is_10_44/ai_n6257715
accounts for c. 3.5% of the electricity consumed in City of London
I think that should be "in Greater London". Technically the City of London is a tiny bit in the very centre of London, with only 10,000 residents, as opposed to the 7.5 million living in Greater London.
No. City of London.
Not London Metropolitan Area.
I think the problem may be if people charge their vehicles on mass when they get home from work. The peak load would be immense. A break in a major tv programme has brought the grid close to collapse when all the kettles are swiched on at once. The system has evolved with London underground electrification in place and can therefore cope.
That's why you give the utility control over the vehicle chargers, and let people specify if they want to pay the basic rate to have the car recharged just enough to get to work by morning, a higher rate to have it fully charged by morning, or premium price to have it fully charged ASAP.
As regards ethanol, Three things:
1. There are incredible amounts of fertile, arable land lying fallow, or greatly underutilized in the world. ex. One third of the U.S. (780 million acres) is broadly categorized as "grazing" land. Of the approx. 440 million acres that are categorized as "cropland," only 246 million acres are actually row-cropped. We pay farmers NOT to farm 36 million acres of that land that is categorized as "cropland."
President Lula estimates that Brazil has about 150 Million acres of fertile land lying fallow. Just imagine the rest of S America, and Africa.
2. With the amount of process heat that is being derived, more, and more, from the feedstocks the EROEI is "Exploding" for ethanol.
3. Due to the new engines' ability to harness the much greater OCTANE of ethanol the biofuel will be able to replace gasoline on a one to one basis.
Oh, one Other thing: With biofuels' ability to plow the CO2 produced back into the ground via biochar, and other means, acidic soils in the Americas, and Africa can be made fertile for the first time.
We're not in nearly as bad a shape as some would think, I believe.
Actually, the dramatically lower net energy balance is just the lungs of the anti-ethanol debate. The heart is the absolute non-scalability of non-energy inputs like water, soil, and GHG sink capacity. Joules Burn earlier posted links to these 2 new articles in SCIENCE, pointing out how bad scaling of biofuels is for Greenhouse gas emissions. I have a similar paper pending on the water requirements for biofuels vis-a-vis conventional fossil fuels.
The First Rule for a life cycle analysis is to use the most recent data. Neither of these thesis did that. The Head of the Department at Iowa State even refused to sign off on that study.
They completely ignored modern farming methods (76% of corn is grown using "no till" farming; and, the idea that trees would be cut down in Brazil (with 150 Million acres of fertile land lying fallow) to plant soybeans is ludicrous (the illegal logging is carried out to get the logs. Later, come the "grazers," and only then do a few subsistence farmers try to get a couple of years of crops out of the substandard, stripped land before it's allowed to return to forest.
As for Indonesia, and Palm oil, they seem to ignore the fact that the palms planted retake the CO2 that's given off when the old trees are used as fuel in the process, or, in the near future, converted into ethanol.
It was a couple of strangely out-dated scenarios that make it hard to overlook the fact that the nature conservancy is supported by, two big oil companies (who have permanent seats on the board. Oh, and Searchinger? He has a Doctorate of Jures Degree, I believe.
It was effective advocacy; BUT, it wasn't Science.
They both made it through SCIENCE peer review, which I can attest, is not an easy feat.
Perhaps this review of paper by the National Academy of Science, that uses most recent data, might have been a better link:
The Implications of Biofuel Production on Water for United States Water Supplies
I agree; water will be a long-term concern (with, or without, ethanol.) The gist of the article seemed to be that it looks okay, now; but, we need to keep an eye on things. I, again, agree.
The study was done before corn ethanol was capped at 15 Billion Gallons. I believe that knowledge would have mitigated some of their concerns.
The fact that only about 15% of corn is irrigated, and that the refineries don't really use all that much water (I believe Minnesota, with all their ethanol refineries, found that they used more water irrigating golf courses than producing ethanol,) and that it's hard to imagine anyone irrigating switchgrass means, I believe, that this won't be a terribly worrying subject.
Look, water is going to be something we concentrate on, more and more, in the future. It just doesn't look like biofuels is going to be a Huge factor in those calculations.