I think this is the beginnings of an economy based on perpetual growth and fossil fuel energy running headlong into geological energy constraints. Basically I see an undulatory downward path for the rest of my life. From here out, I think any rallies in our economic condition are going to be met with spiking commodity prices that knock us right back down.
http://peakoil.com/fortopic50.html _________________ "When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." - Stephen F Roberts.
Paul Roberts states in his book that the cost of producing a single barrel hover around $15 for most oil-producing countries. In Saudi Arabia thats way, way lower. Something like $1.5 - $3 dollars a barrel. That means that with the current crude oil price they make a $40 dollar profit on each barrel. Now wonder the saudis are so dammn rich. _________________ PEAK OIL CENTER
http://members.home.nl/peakoil/
What are the total energy requirements to pump up oil from 5000 (or whatever) down in the ground, filter out the solids and separate the gasses, pump it along a pipeline to the nearest port, say 1,000 km distant, pump it into a supertanker, run that colossus of a ship half-way round the world, pump it out of the ship (returning it to the port of origin with ballast, treating the ballast for pollution before discharge), pumping the oil by pipeline to the refinery, cracking and refining it, mixing in the additives, pumping it into a road tanker which drags it another 300 km, pumps it into the filling station's tanks, pump it into the car's tank and converts it into mechanical energy with an inefficient energy.
I'll vow that for every kilojoule of mechanical energy produced by the car, it requires 4 or 5 kJ of energy from the oilwell _________________ Devil
To process oil in a refinery where I work. I don't think we're all that energy efficient compared to most.
0.145 MCF of nat gas/bbl
115 kWH/bbl of electricity
.145 MCF is about 80 cents of natural gas. It's about 140,000 BTU, whereas 1 barrel is 6.1M BTU, so it's about 1/40 of a barrel of natural gas.
115 kwh is about 3 gallons of gas heating value.
As for how much is invested in the oil fields, I don't know. If an oil well produces 10,000 barrels per day, as some do in Saudi Arabia, then that is 3.6M per year, maybe 1 billion over its life. That pays for alot of drilling, etc.
Is the price of oil quoted, say $40 per barrel, the price in the Middle East, or the price delivered?
How many barrels per oil tanker? 1 million? I would think it would only add $1 or $2 per barrel for delivery.
Say it takes them 1 barrel to get 30, then they waste 3 of those 30 on transportation, refining, etc. So you have a net of 26. Then you burn the 26 in your car and have 20% efficiency, so that is 5.2 barrels effective per barrel invested.
But the key ratio isn't 5.2, it's 30. As long as you can get more oil out (including prospecting, drilling, setting up pipelines) than you have to invest, it pays to invest that oil. After all, the efficiencies of a car engine are there whether you use the original 1 barrel or the proceeds of that 1 barrel (in this case 26). You'd also have transportation costs, refining costs of that 1 original barrel.
It is interesting though. They say there is a lot of oil in "deep seas" but if they have to invest so much oil finding it, then it won't make sense. They'll know this not by looking at EROEI which will be hard to find, but just by looking at the price of discovery and production vs. potential output.
It depends on which region of the world the oil is sourced from. If from the Middle East, It is probably no more than of 1/30th of a barrel when extraction, transportation, refining and distribution is considered. If from a deep water well, it is probably more than 1/10th of a barrel. If from the continental U.S. that figure is more than 1/5th of a barrel and tar sands is about between 1/3 and 1/2 of a barrel. Oil shales are probably more than a barrel and thus not feasible for energy, maybe as feedstock.
Posted: Wed Jul 21, 2004 1:59 pm Post subject: How is deep oil drawn tothe surface
The question about the cost of extracting oil raises the interesting quesiton to me, of how much energyh goes into pumpoing deep oil to the surface.
I do not understand how it is done either, as crude oil is so viscous, almost sticky and you cannot draw even water from lower than about 30' without using a submersible pump.
Do they have to inject deep wells with steam or water otr compressed air to force the oil up?
If so, how much does this cost?
Joined: Apr 21, 2004 Posts: 508 Location: Republic of Texas
Posted: Thu Jul 22, 2004 8:09 am Post subject:
I don't know how much it costs to operate a pump jack like Devil is referring to, but there are a whole lotta 2-10 barrel per day wells in this part of Texas so it can't be that much.
Good analogy Aaron,
But what about the option of keeping everyone on the train and rationing?
And kenbathrhume, no one ever said that solar would solve all energy problems alone. What I'm arguing is that we need to invest in solar right now, while we still have some oil and coal left to improve the production processes improve solar's EROEI, etc. so that in the future we won't be so energy starved.
Posted: Wed Sep 08, 2004 9:54 pm Post subject: Getting Beyond the Limitations of EROEI
EROEI seems to me a sacred cow that needs shooting.
As a deficient analytical measure of the net energy value of energy resources in our present predicament, it provides highly misleading propaganda for those who fear any change from ever more centralized economic power.
E.g. Saudi crude 30:1; Brazilian Cassava Ethanol (1978) 1.15:1; therefore dismiss the latter as "uneconomic" or similar derogatory cliche.
In the total absence of any means of quantifying the 'externalities' of using an energy resource (who gets what degree of harm in the process) EROEI promotes a tunnel vision of competitive consumption, while veiling the crucial recognition of the mutual benefits of sustainable production.
Put it this way, if American car-dependence poisons Canada's forests, hitting their annual yield of feedstock for sustainable methanol production, how has the EROEI of Saudi oil changed ? More to the point, how could anyone gather the data to get even a crude estimate of that change ?
You remember the accountant's motto?: "What can be counted, gets counted."
With weather impacts intensifying around the planet this is not an academic point, it is severely practical: EROEI is a misleading farce that we've inherited from incompetent/unethical C20 economics.
Personally I'm working on a set of criteria for the comparative evaluation of energy technology options as if children mattered, which looks likely to incorporate the requirements of Sustainability, Relevance and Legitimacy.
Yet a simpler and preferably numerical formula is clearly needed for rule-of-thumb comparisons.
A crucial metric is emerging via the United Nations 'Framework Convention on Climate Change,' which is steadily moving towards the policy framework of "Contraction & Convergence." This has been developed and promoted by the London-based Global Commons Institute. (If you're interested see: www.gci.org.uk).
The global metric of that policy framework will necessarily be the Tonne-of-Carbon-Dioxide-Equivalent (TCO2Eq) of each nation's net output of the various greenhouse gasses.
Assuming this metric is sufficiently potent to be useful, I would appreciate peoples' thoughts of how it could be integrated into an effective formula with which to replace EROEI ?
Last edited by backstop on Sun Nov 14, 2004 9:12 pm; edited 1 time in total
I thought brazil is not using much ethnol (cassava/ cane suger) these days?
Trying to formulate an alternative to EROI that takes into account acid rain/murcury contect/potential of coal would be a good idea, but "global climate change" is a very diffrent matter.
No one can predidict what will happen as a result of NATURAL climate change (you know the stuff that caused both the "ice ages" and "Vinland"?) ...So how can we model MANMADE changes effectively?
Our weather forcasters can't predict where a hurricaine will strike, or if it will rain for certain on any given day...And you want the weather forcast for 200 years.... _________________ With Love to all, and Malice to none.
"A people is conquered not when they lose a war, but when they adopt the song and customs of the enemy"
-Chacham S
Joined: Aug 22, 2004 Posts: 91 Location: Potsdam, Germany
Posted: Thu Sep 09, 2004 6:07 am Post subject:
Virginian,actually, it is rather easier to forecast global climate chance than it is to forecast lokal weather conditions.
Reasons:
- You can abstract from all sorts of minor influences, because they are either completely outbalanced by larger influences or level out over time
- You don't need exact values of, say, temperature change, because it is really scary enough to know that it will increase between, say, 2 to 5 degrees celsius. Even the lower number will put major climate stress on many regions of the world (storms, draugths, floods, sea level rises), whereas anything close to the higher number might actually create a global desaster (desertification, constant flooding, fast species dieoffs etc.)
As a metric for global climate change, CO2 emission is very useful, because even if we do not know by how much temperature will rise, we know for sure that CO2 levels (and methane levels and many other levels) cause an increase - and that is all we need to know.
Backstop, your disgust at the frequent abuse of ERoEI figures is well noted. It is possible to misuse any statistic when it's meaning is taken out of context.
However, the energy flow through a system is absolutely fundamental to the sustainability of that system. It is not the only factor crucial to sustainability, but it is necessary. ERoEI figures, when used appropriately, yield valuable insight into the potential for various processes to contribute to the energy required to sustain a system.
Consider human activity as a whole. We have a certain amount of energy available to us to perform productive work. This energy can either be used to free up further energy in the future, or used toward current consumption. If energy is used today to satisfy current consumption, then it can be converted into utility at a rate that is determined by the efficiency of producing technologies. If we want to use that energy to reinvest for the future, so that more energy will be available to us in the future, ERoEI is supposed to approximate the efficiency with which energy invested now will yield more energy in the future.
Little example...Say we have 8 energy units available. Imagine society has an average ERoEI of 5. Presume an average production efficiency of 50%.
We might choose to invest 2 of those energy units into future energy production, freeing the remaining 6 units up for consumption. At our assumed production efficiency, total current production for consumption is 3 units. The investment of 2 units for future energy production at an ERoEI of 5 yields a future energy availability of 10 units.
Now at time 2, we have 10 units of energy available. In the previous time period, total consumption was 3 units. Population has grown since then, so to maintain the same consumption per capita, I'll assume consumption is 3.5 units. To produce this will take 7 energy units at our current level of productive efficiency. That leaves 3 units to invest in future energy availability. If we can make this investment at our current ERoEI of 5, this will yield 15 units of energy available at time 3. On the other hand, if some of our best energy investment means (high ERoEI) are depleted, and we have to rely upon less efficient means of ensuring energy availabilty, our average ERoEI will decrease. If our average ERoEI decreases to 4, then that investment of 3 units will only yield 12 units at time 3.
The purpose of this little abstraction is to demonstrate the sensitivity to the behaviour of the system to variation in ERoEI, and the dependence of the sustainability of the system upon ERoEI. It does not, and is not designed to tell everything about the long run sustainability of the system given typical production practices which may have other effects, like reducing productive efficiency (pollution) or future ERoEI (depletion).
Now everyone is probably itching to respond that the boundaries of an ERoEI calculation are arbitrary, or undefined, and the some of these factors should be incorporated in current ERoEI. To some extent I agree. But my response to these is that any ERoEI calculation is only meaningful at the scope and in the timescale at which it was created. For example, in the little example above, the ERoEI was 5 in time 1 and then 4 in time 2. However, if we were looking in time scales of 2 time units, then total energy input into energy production was (2 + 3) and total energy freed was (10 + 12). Thus ERoEI at time (1, 2) was 22/5, or 4.4. So the same system, when considered from different timescales, will have a different ERoEI. This is not a weakness, it is a sensitivity. But it does mean that for meaningful use of ERoEI numbers, timescale needs to be considered. The same is true of scope.
When considering the sustainability of a system, the ERoEI perspective can yield interesting conclusions. For example, if one was consciously trying to develop a sustainable system, you don't necessarily want to adopt high ERoEI strategies of energy capture. That makes sustainability of the system dependent upon high average ERoEI in the future, which could be difficult to maintain. The absolute worst possible thing you could do is choose your highest yield ERoEI production cycle to be based on a depleting resource, and then allow that to form the bulk of your production cycle as well (this is what we have with oil). This will be unsustainable, and will lead to system failure, unless you discover new means of energy capture with high ERoEI before the initial resource depletes.
However, once we have a system in place that is dependent upon high ERoEI, ERoEI analysis can show us that maintaining average ERoEI will be crucial to the sustainability of the system (to some extent improvements at the other end, productive efficiency, can help to manage losses of ERoEI; the dependency of the economic system upon growth exacerbates this threat). Again, it's not the only thing. We could have nuclear war, for example. But energy availability is a necessary requirement, and that's why, when used properly, ERoEI analysis is useful.
Rather than shoot the sacred cow and lose the milk, I'd rather shoot the people who misuse ERoEI figures... Particularly those who use it to, as you say, propagandise against the value of leaving centralized power (Rather, distributed energy sources should typically lead to a more resilient and sustainable system – provided energy can be freed efficiently enough, of course).
Just a thought to clarify...
Quote:
Personally I'm working on a set of criteria for the comparative evaluation of energy technology options as if children mattered
I appreciate what you're getting at. ERoEI does in no way take into account children, or anyone else for that matter. But it's not supposed to. If people are using it that way, to imply that higher ERoEI is better for children, these people are abusing the statistic. They don't understand it. The fact is that welfare (of children, of the poor, of whoever) is not necessarily in the interest of sustainability of the system. If you want a measure that targets sustainable welfare, that's good, but don't expect ERoEI to do that. It wont.
Also, systems that have a high ERoEI over short time scales are probably more likely to collapse over longer time scales. That probably summarises the situation we've got ourselves into. So I think it's a mistake to criticise ERoEI because it doesn't measure long term sustainability. It's not supposed to do that either (unless we used a suitably large timescale, but then it would be impossible to measure).
On the topic of developing a new measure that better targets sustainability, that's a very challenging task. Remember, carbon emissions are just one threat to sustainability posed by energy extraction. If you wanted a measure of sustainability that goes to the n-th degree, I presume you'd want to take into account the increased risk of nuclear war from reprocessing nuclear fuels, for example. Just like the challenges with carbon emissions, these things are extremely hard to quantify, to say the least. The problem with carbon is that it's been hard enough to get people to agree the there is a problem in the first place - it's going to be much harder to get people to agree upon how much warming they have caused. To get a measure of sustainability, you need to do better than that. You need to get agreement on how much future damage will be caused be further changes in carbon concentration. Even if people agreed how much of current climate change was caused by historic carbon, then agreed to a methodology to quantify that cost (in dollar terms, for example), you would still likely have great disagreement on the effect of future changes in carbon concentration, and subsequent quantisation (eg. cost) of such.
I think the goal is admirable, but the challenges are perhaps too great. Imagine a measure for sustainability of the human system? You need a measure to quantify which behaviours a person should take to keep himself or herself alive. Here's the tricky part. You're only allowed to look at that one person to draw your conclusions (just as we have but one earth).
I’m probably falling into the classic trap of demanding too much from the new measure, where an improvement is certainly easier that perfection. If you wanted to, there’s no reason why you cant include damage to future ERoEI in current ERoEI calculations, but I suspect that the very things you would be trying to get out of it (hydrocarbon energy is unsustainable) is the very assumption upon which your new figures would be based. In other words, the science comes before the figures, and the figures wont prove any more than the science already does.
At the end of the day, even if short term ERoEI figures for hydrocarbon energy massively overstate the sustainability of their use, this doesn't mean that the system is sustainable using lower ERoEI alternative energy sources. Rather, it is this quandary that poses the very dilemma as to how our current system may be sustained. What we need are alternatives to hydrocarbon energy sources that are BOTH more sustainable in an environmental sense, AND, can come close to hydrocarbon energy source ERoEI on an equivalent short term ERoEI. A formidable challenge. The very challenge posed by peak oil...
You'd think with a post that long, I wouldn't need to clarify anything, but, one more thing.
I've heard people say, often enough, that hydrocarbon energy is so heavily subsidised, and that's why renewable can't compete. Thus, the logic goes, if those subsidies were taken away (or costs for carbon emissions imposed, for example), we'd move to renewables and everything would be fine.
This logic infuriates me.
The first sentence is absolutely correct. The second just doesn't follow at all.
In the same way, humanity has overgrown carrying capacity on the subsidy provided to us by nature in the form of fossil fuels. When those fuels are gone our society will no longer be sustainable. So too, the world economy is dependent upon cheap energy from fossil fuels, which are in turn only cheap because of those subsidies. If the subsidies are gone, neither fossil fuels nor renewables will be able to economically serve the market (will be cheap in an absolute sense ('real' in economic jingo)). If one becomes much more expensive, the other one doesn't get cheaper in an absolute sense (except in relatively small amounts due to economies of scale, technology development, etc.). They're both bad. In terms of sustaining the society we have now, neither of these appear to afford sustainability...
Not that I don't support such actions... The sooner we discouraged flagrant abuse of hydrocarbon stores the better. But to presume that making renewables relatively cheaper, but taxing alternatives, can solve the problem, is mistaken.
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Now wonder the saudis are so dammn rich.
Particularly those who use it to, as you say, propagandise against the value of leaving centralized power (Rather, distributed energy sources should typically lead to a more resilient and sustainable system – provided energy can be freed efficiently enough, of course).
