[John_A]

2nd law great, but your interpretation is as usual nonsensical.

Certainly among those who don't understand that a numerator being zero causes a given ratio to be zero might think all sorts of things are nonsensical.

When dealing with highly dense fossil fuel sources the energy required to produce them was invested (pre)historically and so in practical terms current EROEI can be effectively > 1.

There is no such thing as a "practical" workaround to the 2nd Law. And nobody, I mean NOBODY cares about the energy put into converting organic matter into oil and gas through geologic processes, the mistake is made when all of the energy inputs necessary to create gasoline, diesel or jet fuel, is not considered in the calculation.

That is how you make EROEI>1. You IGNORE the energy in the chemical feedstock. Cherry pick the inputs, as it were.

The idea that we compare energy inputs due to geological processes with current costs of extraction is quite clearly not how the concept of EROEI is meant to be applied.

The beauty of how EROEI is applied is that it can be tailored to whatever belief system is doing the calculating. Ignore the actual energy required to go into the system, and you can make the answer anything you wish. As far as how it is being applied, can you please refer me to some text or class I may take on how EROEI is used in the oil and gas industry that I might understand this metric in light of the industry it is applied to around here to learn more?

Strikes me that Rockman has been pretty clear on his training on this topic, how it is used in boardrooms, discussions among upper management, etc etc.

[Quinny]

If NOBODY bothers, where do you come up with

How much energy went into manufacturing that one gallon of diesel? Certainly, in our world where the 2nd Law of Therm does apply, more energy went into making that gallon than is embodied in it...and that is something you did NOT sign an invoice for, but which must be accounted for, if you are really doing EROEI.

?

[John_A]

If NOBODY bothers, where do you come up with

How much energy went into manufacturing that one gallon of diesel? Certainly, in our world where the 2nd Law of Therm does apply, more energy went into making that gallon than is embodied in it...and that is something you did NOT sign an invoice for, but which must be accounted for, if you are really doing EROEI.

?

What do you mean? Rockman was claiming he knew all this EROEI information related to his drilling operation, I assumed he had figured this all up already, if he was able to do such calculations. Certainly his other comments on EROEI would lead non-industry folks to believe that nobody in industry cares diddly about these things, and decisions certainly aren't made using this metric either. If suddenly Rock has these numbers to make such a calculation, it would be wonderful to see them.

[Keith_McClary]

Why is it such applications, known and used by the economists and modelers at the EIA, are excluded in your construct?

http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/emdworkshop/pdf/technology.pdf

Effects on overall performance, effect on production profiles, effects on economics or resource....all of these changes with respect to time are known, and quantified.

From that slideshow:

All target improvements will be calculated in the process and timing models.
• Variables will be defined to address such target improvements.
• EIA expects to complete this model by June/July 2008
– Testing and final results by September 2008
• EIA will present preliminary results to this committee in August 2008 for comments and suggestions.

How did that work out? Is everything "known, and quantified" now?

[Keith_McClary]

A tad shy of $2 TRILLION more per year. Damn successful. Oh...wait...did you mean successful for the oil patch or the consumers? Sorry...sometimes I forget about those "little people". LOL.

EXACTLY!! The oil business has never cared about the little people before, and you and your boss certainly aren't about to start now. What the market will bear...and guess what? The market obviously can bear MORE. So pour it on big guy! If your company can get $200/bbl for its product, DO IT!! You and your boss deserve it, being fine, upstanding oilmen, versus all those other kind.

A good measure of "The Real Peak oil" would be the cost of oil as a % of consumer spending. I don't mean the direct costs to consumers for gasoline, electricity and NG, rather the total cost of oil, since this is ultimately paid for by consumers.

Same for "The Real Peak Fossil Fuels".

I think statistics for global consumer spending and total cost of FF are available, but I haven't seen them compared as % in this way. Anyone seen charts of this?

Note that consumer spending is not the same as GDP. It is possible that cost of FF is declining as a % of GDP but increasing as a % of consumer spending. That would happen if the industrial part of the GDP is growing relative to consumer product output (as you would expect with decreased EROEI).

[Quinny]

You haven't answered the ? You make a statement saying that more energy went into manufacturing that one gallon of diesel than is embodied in it! Do you believe this? What makes it so? Though I have a lot of respect for what ROCKMAN says, he didn't say this. You did! Please explain?

If NOBODY bothers, where do you come up with

How much energy went into manufacturing that one gallon of diesel? Certainly, in our world where the 2nd Law of Therm does apply, more energy went into making that gallon than is embodied in it...and that is something you did NOT sign an invoice for, but which must be accounted for, if you are really doing EROEI.

?

What do you mean? Rockman was claiming he knew all this EROEI information related to his drilling operation, I assumed he had figured this all up already, if he was able to do such calculations. Certainly his other comments on EROEI would lead non-industry folks to believe that nobody in industry cares diddly about these things, and decisions certainly aren't made using this metric either. If suddenly Rock has these numbers to make such a calculation, it would be wonderful to see them.

[John_A]

Why is it such applications, known and used by the economists and modelers at the EIA, are excluded in your construct?

http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/emdworkshop/pdf/technology.pdf

Effects on overall performance, effect on production profiles, effects on economics or resource....all of these changes with respect to time are known, and quantified.

From that slideshow:

All target improvements will be calculated in the process and timing models.
• Variables will be defined to address such target improvements.
• EIA expects to complete this model by June/July 2008
– Testing and final results by September 2008
• EIA will present preliminary results to this committee in August 2008 for comments and suggestions.

How did that work out? Is everything "known, and quantified" now?

I don't know. A look see of the NEMS model:

http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/aeo/overview/

and nothing really jumps out at you. Them thinking about it is the primary benefit I imagine, peak oil forecasts keep going horribly wrong exactly because they don't recognize and quantify these types of things. Makes one wonder why this kind of open source modeling, bottom up analysis utilizing price as a driver (exactly as Rockman has advocated) can't be used to do this oil forecasting stuff. A decent bottoms up analysis seems superior to fitting always declining equations to time series data, and then a bunch of bozo's standing around a few years later smacking themselves in the head going "duh" when they get it all wrong and are trying to figure out why.

[John_A]

You haven't answered the ? You make a statement saying that more energy went into manufacturing that one gallon of diesel than is embodied in it! Do you believe this?

I apologize. Of course I believe that more energy goes into manufacturing a gallon of diesel than that gallon then contains. This is a requirement of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

What makes it so? Though I have a lot of respect for what ROCKMAN says, he didn't say this. You did! Please explain?

To make a gallon of diesel there is a process. This process takes place in a refinery. Into a refinery you pour all sorts of aromatic long chain hydrocarbon nasties, alkanes and alkenes, cycloalkanes, just gives me chills thinking of all the ways these things can give you cancer.

Diesel is then a fractional distillate of the nasties you put into the refinery, you apply heat (energy in) and between 200C and 350C this cool stuff comes out with the approximate number of carbon atoms that you are looking for, and then we call this "diesel", and put it in our tanks and cars and construction equipment.

To GET that diesel requires two things, the energy contained in the chemical feedstock and the energy going into the fractionation process....so you absolutely POUR in all this feedstock and energy...and out the other side you get just one subset of the aromatic hydrocarbon chain in the form of a gallon of diesel. So to go from a gallon of normal crude oil and its energy content to a gallon of diesel and its energy content requires an external energy input, and all it is doing is heating things up so you get JUST the long chain hydrocarbon you want.

So input = crude oil + energy, output = diesel.....and because that energy didn't cause the gallon of diesel to STORE more energy, it was only used to do the work of separation, you now have less energy than you started with, all that energy having been used just to create heat to run this process.

Presto. More energy in (one gallon or so of crude + energy to heat it) then comes out (one gallon of diesel).

The 2nd Law is a cruel task mistress, but no process escapes her grasp.

[Strummer]

Counting the full amount of energy embedded in a gallon of oil as "input" of EROEI calculation is nonsense. EROEI means energy returned on energy invested, and we didn't invest anything into creating that gallon of oil, 500 millions years of geological processes did that, but those are irrelevant from our point of view, and their output is "free" for us, just like the energy output of the Sun's solar activity.

We only invested in the extraction of that gallon, so the inputs of the EROEI calculation for a gallon of diesel are costs of extraction of the gallon of oil plus the costs of manufacturing diesel from that oil.

And you should be able to understand it, given how often you refer to economists and their calculations. Do financial ROI calculations include all inputs? I mean, according to you, they should, right? So when a company builds a factory, let's include everything in the costs... the roads that have been built by the state, the costs of building a power-station by the state that provides the electricity for the factory, even the costs of the city police, which protects the factory from burglars. All those things are costs, right? So the factory owner should include them in his ROI calculation, never mind the fact that he got them for "free", just as we got for free the energy of that barrel of oil.

[Quinny]

Stop digging!

And nobody, I mean NOBODY cares about the energy put into converting organic matter into oil and gas through geologic processes, the mistake is made when all of the energy inputs necessary to create gasoline, diesel or jet fuel, is not considered in the calculation.

You haven't answered the ? You make a statement saying that more energy went into manufacturing that one gallon of diesel than is embodied in it! Do you believe this?

I apologize. Of course I believe that more energy goes into manufacturing a gallon of diesel than that gallon then contains. This is a requirement of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

What makes it so? Though I have a lot of respect for what ROCKMAN says, he didn't say this. You did! Please explain?

To make a gallon of diesel there is a process. This process takes place in a refinery. Into a refinery you pour all sorts of aromatic long chain hydrocarbon nasties, alkanes and alkenes, cycloalkanes, just gives me chills thinking of all the ways these things can give you cancer.

Diesel is then a fractional distillate of the nasties you put into the refinery, you apply heat (energy in) and between 200C and 350C this cool stuff comes out with the approximate number of carbon atoms that you are looking for, and then we call this "diesel", and put it in our tanks and cars and construction equipment.

To GET that diesel requires two things, the energy contained in the chemical feedstock and the energy going into the fractionation process....so you absolutely POUR in all this feedstock and energy...and out the other side you get just one subset of the aromatic hydrocarbon chain in the form of a gallon of diesel. So to go from a gallon of normal crude oil and its energy content to a gallon of diesel and its energy content requires an external energy input, and all it is doing is heating things up so you get JUST the long chain hydrocarbon you want.

So input = crude oil + energy, output = diesel.....and because that energy didn't cause the gallon of diesel to STORE more energy, it was only used to do the work of separation, you now have less energy than you started with, all that energy having been used just to create heat to run this process.

Presto. More energy in (one gallon or so of crude + energy to heat it) then comes out (one gallon of diesel).

The 2nd Law is a cruel task mistress, but no process escapes her grasp.

[John_A]

Counting the full amount of energy embedded in a gallon of oil as "input" of EROEI calculation is nonsense.

Really? Where do you think the energy from that diesel comes from? A clue...the original gallon (give or take) of crude oil. And guess what? That gallon of crude...it is energy! Light a match inside a refinery sometime...see what happens when you accidentally release it.

A gallon of diesel fuel isn't BUILT from unicorn farts and the dreams of those who have never taken a thermodynamics class in their lives, it starts with the energy contained in a gallon (or so) of crude oil. Then MORE energy is added to make the crude into the product actually desired by human folks....diesel.

It is all quite straight forward.

EROEI means energy returned on energy invested, and we didn't invest anything into creating that gallon of oil, 500 millions years of geological processes did that, but those are irrelevant from our point of view, and their output is "free" for us, just like the energy output of the Sun's solar activity.

The chemical feedstock is itself a component of the energy input into the system. Without it, you would have to make your diesel from some other chemical feedstock, it also containing the energy you need to build diesel.

Did geologic processes take organic matter and boil away all sorts of things you aren't interested in, leaving you with a substance of great smelliness, that once brought down property values, the fecal matter of the planet? Absolutely. Turns out, all those hydrogen atoms in one place are wonderful in terms of the energy they contain when combusted. But you DON'T get to pretend that without that energy, you would still get your diesel fuel out the other end of the system, all chock full of those SAME hydrogen molecules. Just ask a chemical engineer if you don't believe me.

We only invested in the extraction of that gallon, so the inputs of the EROEI calculation for a gallon of diesel are costs of extraction of the gallon of oil plus the costs of manufacturing diesel from that oil.

You are describing how EROEI avoids the unpleasant truth of the 2nd Law. I agree with you. If you limit the inputs you count into the system, say, excluding a MAJORITY of the actual energy involved, you can get EROEI to do whatever you wish. And there are those who do exactly this. You try making diesel fuel without the energy contained within the gallon of crude oil, see how it works for you.

And you should be able to understand it, given how often you refer to economists and their calculations. Do financial ROI calculations include all inputs? I mean, according to you, they should, right? So when a company builds a factory, let's include everything in the costs... the roads that have been built by the state, the costs of building a power-station by the state that provides the electricity for the factory, even the costs of the city police, which protects the factory from burglars. All those things are costs, right? So the factory owner should include them in his ROI calculation, never mind the fact that he got them for "free", just as we got for free the energy of that barrel of oil.

You have just jumped across the fence from the energy side to the investment including human $$ side. And therein lies the rub. They aren't the same thing, but if you want someone to calculate ALL their life cycle costs to a project, things like the air pollution caused by a factory, the lives lost to that increased pollution, the ground paved over lost to the ecosystem, hey, I am all for it. Some people advocate that, and they are probably quite right.

Obviously, some people do NOT want the total costs of a new factory being calculated. It makes it look terribly expensive, and then expert witnesses and whatnot will be involved in the lawsuits, and we don't come cheap, and can fight all day about the exact distribution of deaths due to air pollution at quite a nice hourly rate.

[Strummer]

So, going by your own logic, solar energy has a hopelessly low EROEI, approaching zero? Because you need to include all the energy that went into the formation of the Sun into the calculation, right?

[Quinny]

It's amusing watching someone trying to avoid contradicting himself

[John_A]

It's amusing watching someone trying to avoid contradicting himself

pstarr is pretty funny that way, isn't he?

[Quinny]

Come on John explain yourself,

It's amusing watching someone trying to avoid contradicting himself

pstarr is pretty funny that way, isn't he?

[Gordianus]

The 2nd Law is a cruel task mistress, but no process escapes her grasp.

John_A: I have read your posts about EROEI and I am a bit baffled by your logic, which I find rather contorted. In the hope of untangling it, I have a couple of questions:

* Why do you think the second law is so important to the discussion (you mention it in almost every post - nobody else does)? I can see that it highlights the inherent thermodynamic inefficiency of any process, but as far as I can see this is a second order effect and not really significant in the context of a discussion about the overall energy balance. Can you elaborate?

* The thrust of your argument seems to be that it doesn't matter if it takes more energy than is in a barrel of diesel to create another barrel of diesel, because we can always get more energy to make more diesel. Where do you propose this input energy comes from?

[John_A]

That gallon of crude...it is energy!

Rubbish.
Without oxygen in the atmosphere, its merely a gallon of organic garbage.

Oh you BETTER be careful with that one. It has been told to us, from the High Priest Heinberg hisself that it is our lot to have squandered this wonderful elixir from the Gods, whereas you just made the same implication I always do....that human ingenuity on how we create our products is the key and not whatever organic garbage we happen to make it from.

So be careful lest you invoke the wrath of the Prophets!

The oxygen comes from present day photosynthesis.
All of our so-called "energy" is 50% present day solar.

Of course crude oil is nothing more than historical sunlight. No argument on that point. Others have pointed out that there are really only two sources of energy humans utilize, that of the sun, and radioactive decay. Everything is just a derivative of those two.

But some folks keep calling crude oil a "source" of energy, but they admittedly aren't near as smart as you have just demonstrated. Organic garbage...I like that one.