Free Republic

Apparently, the principles of material and energy balances are alien territory for many.

They are ignored at some great peril. Rudolf Clausius must be spinning in his Bonn grave. Boltzmann and Georgescu-Roegen could rotating in sympathy.

As Piet Hein said, "A lifetime is more than sufficiently long for people to get what there is of it wrong."

The (National Corn Grower's Association) cited Argonne energy balance is a transparent fake.

The basis for the gasoline energy balance is the potential energy of petroleum in the ground.

The basis for the ethanol balance is the finished energy content of diesel, gasoline, NG, LPG, and coal. An inferred energy credit is claimed for a non-energy coproduct, "animal feeds". The coproduct represents 36.5% of the claimed energy production.

Using two different starting points for energy balance comparisons is an invalid practice.

Shell stated that they will not make a decision for a commercial operation until 2010. While somebody may have
used a 3.5-1 ERORI, that seems inconsistent with the quoted statement below (10/24/06). Production of major quantities at a practical rate will require energy and water. The rate at which the raw product seeps out of the soil will also
be an important factor.

"John Hofmeister, the head of Royal Dutch Shell's U.S. unit, and other officials have been encouraged for the past year since they concluded that the oil-shale technology was viable, said Jill Davis, a project spokeswoman.

"We know the technology works," Davis said, after Hofmeister's remarks to Bloomberg News. "The thing is we have to determine whether it works on a commercial scale."

The decision to invest in oil-shale production probably will be made "no earlier" than 2010, she added."

Price is an abstraction in an economic system loaded with subsidies, tax credits, etc.

We probably have enough coal to last 3-4 centuries if we assume that it doesn't have to replace some of the energy of petroleum, NG, and LPG. We depend on coal to produce electrical energy. Zero-sum game time again. Eventually, decisions will have to be made about what must be sacrificed.

Exploitation of shale oil (btw, neither oil nor shale) requires large quantities of energy and water. The area in which our largest deposits of kerogen exist, i.e., the Green River Basin, is arid. What will be the source of input energy over the long-term.

The show-stopper is ERORI, or energy return on energy investment. That killed the embryonic shale oil industry
in the early 80s. If the ERORI is negative, no amount of financial sleight-of-hand can change the fact that we would be consuming more energy than could be produced.

Consider a variation on the theme. The Canadians are producing heavy grades of oil from tar sands in Alberta. They are limited by the rate at which they can "mine" the material and by a long-term source of input energy. They have been using natural gas. But when NG supplies begin to decline, what then? The U.S. would have to face that problem , too. U.S. per well NG production has been declining for several years.

Economics are a function of resources. Ultimately, resource availability is the controlling factor.

Fossil energy has everything to do with the issue. The world is consuming petroleum at (roughly) million times faster than it was formed. NG and LPG were produced from the same source materials (phytoplanktons and zooplanktons), albeit at different rates. If we consume fossil hydrocarbons of all types to make a derivative material such as ethanol, we are playing a zero-sum game.

Consider the dynamics. The U.S. had one of the three largest original petroleum reserves in the world. Our production has been declining since 1970-71. That decline is about 2.25% per year. Eventually, world production has to follow a similar pattern.

By 2050, our petroleum supply, including imports, could be less than half its current value, i.e., 2.99 gallons per person-day; that is assuming that we could continue to consume 25% of world production, which is unlikely.

By the end of the century, supply could be 10% of current levels. In this context, the problem should be clear.

The website is that of the National Corngrowers Association. The somewhat edited version of the ANL presentation material has significant flaws, as does the original material. The gasoline energy balance includes the primary energy of all fossil material inputs in addition to the energy required to refine and produce the final product.

The ethanol balance uses only the energy of the finished energy input materials. This is absurd. One of these things is not like the other. Note that the commonly-accepted energy return for gasoline is a 10-1 ratio.

Also omitted from the ethanol balance is a large energy credit taken for a non-energy co-product, DDGS ("dried distillers grains with solubles"). Without this credit, the original USDA paper reports a 6% positive energy balance.

More fatal is the universally-ignored impact on net productivity. One must divide the gross ethanol production by 16.7 to get the incremental energy production. When one considers that U.S. annual gasoline consumption is 143.9 billion gallons (10/27/2006), or the equivalent energy of 219.7 billion gallons of ethanol, one can see the limitations of an ethanol energy economy.

There is not enough arable land in the U.S. to supply even an E10 transportation economy, assuming we were willing to forego food production. The current lust for fuel ethanol would vanish without the 51 cent per gallon subsidy.