The Oil Drum

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?