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144 comments on Implications of Energy Return on Investment, Peak Oil and the Concept of “Best First”
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144 comments on Implications of Energy Return on Investment, Peak Oil and the Concept of “Best First”
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1) energy is not the only cost in procuring nat gas. EROI attempts to parse everything into energy, but can't account for water permits, labor, etc.
2)the costs are different than the commodity price that you quote - its 4 months old, now but in this post, I included graphics on marginal and average cost per MCF in North America (over $8 and $6 respectively)
3)Though we have to do it because we don't have direct energy data, I am wary of estimating EROI using dollars. Its like looking at a series of mirrors in a funhouse. Though how else to get people this information in chunks they understand I do not know.
In addition we have to look at the health consequences of using different energy technologies. For example an estimated 500,000 Chinese die every year from coal smoke related health problems. 4000 to 6000 Chinese coal miners die ever year in accidents. In the United States people who live near coal fired power plants are significantly more likely to have serious health problems, than people who don't live near them. Cooking and heating with natural gas potentially can expose home residents to radiation exposure from radon gas that is present in natural gas. Radon exposures through natural gas have been estimated to kill as many as 20,000 Americans every year. These are significant costs not captured by EROEI analysis.
Quantifying EROEI is highly problematic, For example empirical studies may be reflect a biase to older and less efficient technologies. If technological changes are underway in an energy segment that dramatically alter EROEI, then a data set reflecting the old technology may be obsolete. Take for example the switch in Uranium enrichment technologies from gaseous diffusion to centrifuges. The Centrifuges are 50 times more energy efficient, but many empirical studies of nuclear EROEI continue to use data sets from the gasious diffusion era. In terms of nuclear EROEI the use of empirical data sets may lead to highly misleading conclusions about present or future nuclear EROEI.
A further problem in determining nuclear EROEI is the failure to assess te effect of alternative technologies on nuclear EROEI. For example, CANDU reactors may use natural rather than enriched uranium, The absence of the energy input into the Uranium enrichment process makes a significant diference in CANDU EROEI.
Lastly, so called "deep burn" reactors extract much greater ammounts of energy from nuclear fuel. The typical Light Water Reactor only extracts 0.6% of the potential energy from Uranium. In contrast the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor is capable of directly extracting 98% of the energy in Thorium, and wasted thorium found in mining tailings is so abundant that all of the worlds energy needs can be supplied from thorium extracted from mine tailings for several thousand years. The amount of energy required to build the LFTR is trivial compared to the energy input in Light Water Reactor construction. The EROEI of a LFTR could easily run to the four figures, but exactly how would we establish this?
Cooking and heating with natural gas potentially can expose home residents to radiation exposure from radon gas that is present in natural gas. Radon exposures through natural gas have been estimated to kill as many as 20,000 Americans every year.
BS !!
Radon has a half-life of 3.825 days. Massive quantities of natural gas are stored for winter use. Radon is totally depleted in this gas.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/natural_gas/ngs/ngs.html
It takes over a week for NG to be piped from LA & TX to northeast, Midwest, CA and even longer to show up at the burner tip.
Even locally, any radon in the natural gas has gone through several half lives by the time it hits the burner tip. Except for cooking, combustion of NG goes directly outdoors.
ANY radon from cooking (very very little) quickly leaves the house. Exposure to radon is nil (New Orleans has among lowest naturally occurring radiation), we get much less than living on top of rock or using more rock (such as concrete aggregate) in construction or being farther above sea level (more cosmic rays).
I could see one or two "computed deaths"/year from radon in natural gas but I suspect << 1.
A made up "threat",
Best Hopes for Concentrating on Real Risks,
Alan
I suppose Alan thinks that on the frequent occasions when natural gas blows up houses, workplaces, and the vicinities of pipelines, these are not nuclear explosions of radon. True.
A week in transit does indeed allow ~75 percent of the radon the natgas emerges from the ground with to decay. What does it decay into, 'AlanfromBigEasy'?
(Threats from small amounts of radiation from natgas and LPG are no more made up than the threats from any small doses of radiation. They are, of course, much less small, much bigger, than doses of radiation from you-know-what.)
--- G.R.L. Cowan (How fire can be domesticated)
222Rn decays to 218Po (half-life 3.10 minutes). The remaining elements in the decay chain are bismuth and thallium, ultimately ending in 206Pb.
Number 7 in the above-linked list, lead-210, is the interesting one. Its 22-year half-life means gas and LPG plumbing accumulate it. Each second about one in a billion of its atoms turns into 210-Bi, and that, within days, turns into 210-Po. 210-Po is also known as Litvinenko's bane.
--- G.R.L. Cowan (How fire can be domesticated)
And, once plated out on the plumbing (which it is likely to do as soon as it becomes 218Po), it is very unlikely to ever wind up at the burner tip and bother anyone.
I would agree that just as externalities should be included in the financial cost of a fuel source, they should be included in EROEI cost as well. Good luck figuring this out.
I hope a future EROI post deals with "legacy" or "sunk" EROEI. I'm not sure how you do this. I would guess that you do it by "depreciating" it over the useful life. You would also have to factor in using up local fuel sources and having to move farther away over time.
Dr. Bernard Cohen has written extensively on radon, the LNT hypothesis and radiation hormesis in The American Journal of Roentgenology and elsewhere.
R Wilson M.D. Radiology ret.
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/
I scanned his list, but did not download his 17 Mb "Catalog of Risks". Nothing in the other titles suggested natural gas as a source of radon.
There is no doubt that radon is a public health risk, but the source is structure (sometimes well water) and not natural gas used for cooking.
Alan