Reporting gross oil production to hide the collapse of net oil production

[dcarrigg]

Re: Reporting gross oil production to hide the collapse of net oil production

Switchgrass for biofuel looks promising but I seldom hear about it. It can grow in the areas where the shale oil fields are, so making switchgrass biofuel refineries close to the shale oil fields would make sense, would it not? Make a fuel that could be used to extract the shale oil, close to where the shale oil is. Then use corn for food instead of fuel.

Is there a "gotcha" to this idea?

The difficult part is making booze (ethanol) from cellulose. Think of it this way - if we could make booze from trees and grass efficiently, we'd be drinking it right now.

That's not to say it can't be done in a pinch. The US, France, Germany, the UK, and Russia made ethanol from cellulose during WWII. It's an old technology. But it's far more efficient to make it from corn or potatoes or whatever. In fact, humans bred corn and wheat and barley from grass for thousands of years so that it would have more energy content (calories). We haven't done that with cellulose because we can't digest it. If we could eat trees and live off them, we'd be doing that too. And we would have invented a very efficient tree for cellulosic conversion by now simply by the fact that we had thousands of years, could breed them, and were hungry.

There's some progress. But it's slow. The most promising stuff is in the genetic modification of switchgrass. There are a lot of people working on this and a lot of grants to do it. But we're not there yet.

[globaleconomicollaps]

Re: Reporting gross oil production to hide the collapse of net oil production

The difficult part is making booze (ethanol) from cellulose. Think of it this way - if we could make booze from trees and grass efficiently, we'd be drinking it right now.

That's not to say it can't be done in a pinch. The US, France, Germany, the UK, and Russia made ethanol from cellulose during WWII. It's an old technology. But it's far more efficient to make it from corn or potatoes or whatever. In fact, humans bred corn and wheat and barley from grass for thousands of years so that it would have more energy content (calories). We haven't done that with cellulose because we can't digest it. If we could eat trees and live off them, we'd be doing that too. And we would have invented a very efficient tree for cellulosic conversion by now simply by the fact that we had thousands of years, could breed them, and were hungry.

There's some progress. But it's slow. The most promising stuff is in the genetic modification of switchgrass. There are a lot of people working on this and a lot of grants to do it. But we're not there yet.

I'm going to shoot off with some totally uninformed opinions here because ... well because I'm drinking heavily and because I CAN!

Industrialists are interested in making ethanol from cellulose because the process has not been in the public domain for more than a thousand years. It requires equipment and techniques that a small farmer cannot hope to duplicate at home. In short it is amenable to control by the rich. Ethanol is currently a leveling force. it resists the capitalist process of centralization and accumulation. Making ethanol is simply too proletarian. Moreover, it uses a source of fuel (trees) that is not now being exploited at the rate of existing corn, sugar beat or sugar cane fields. That situation will end in a relative heartbeat if trees start being used as car fuel in large numbers. It is not an accident that switchgrass or here in France elephant grass is being supported by government research programs ( at the expense of improved sugar beat conversion efforts I might add). It is because farmers are obliged to buy rhizomes and planting equipment and sell the grass to a "refinery" that they could never hope to duplicate ( and in fact would be illegal to duplicate due to monopolistic intellectual property laws).

[shiny!]

Re: Reporting gross oil production to hide the collapse of net oil production

There's some progress. But it's slow. The most promising stuff is in the genetic modification of switchgrass. There are a lot of people working on this and a lot of grants to do it. But we're not there yet.

This abstract is pretty detailed:

Net energy of cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass

Perennial herbaceous plants such as switchgrass (Panicum virgatum L.) are being evaluated as cellulosic bioenergy crops. Two major concerns have been the net energy efficiency and economic feasibility of switchgrass and similar crops. All previous energy analyses have been based on data from research plots (<5 m²) and estimated inputs. We managed switchgrass as a biomass energy crop in field trials of 3–9 ha (1 ha = 10,000 m²) on marginal cropland on 10 farms across a wide precipitation and temperature gradient in the midcontinental U.S. to determine net energy and economic costs based on known farm inputs and harvested yields. In this report, we summarize the agricultural energy input costs, biomass yield, estimated ethanol output, greenhouse gas emissions, and net energy results. Annual biomass yields of established fields averaged 5.2 -11.1 Mg·ha⁻¹ with a resulting average estimated net energy yield (NEY) of 60 GJ·ha⁻¹·y⁻¹. Switchgrass produced 540% more renewable than nonrenewable energy consumed. Switchgrass monocultures managed for high yield produced 93% more biomass yield and an equivalent estimated NEY than previous estimates from human-made prairies that received low agricultural inputs. Estimated average greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from cellulosic ethanol derived from switchgrass were 94% lower than estimated GHG from gasoline. This is a baseline study that represents the genetic material and agronomic technology available for switchgrass production in 2000 and 2001, when the fields were planted. Improved genetics and agronomics may further enhance energy sustainability and biofuel yield of switchgrass. (more...)

How does this compare to corn and/or sugar beets?

[GRG55]

Re: Oil sands cost sought

EROEI does matter and it is not philosophical or abstract.

Before fossil fuels, human cultures were using renewable energy: whatever was produced by nature via the sun's energy. EROEI also mattered then...

As difficult as it is for some folks to believe it, fossil fuels are also "produced by nature via the sun's energy". It just takes a bit longer than growing a tree to replace the one that was chopped down and burned to cook dinner in the days before humans started using coal, kerosene and electricity to do that.

EROEI, measured directly in units of energy, is an utterly meaningless concept. We don't create or destroy energy...all we can do is convert it from one form to another. And at each stage of every conversion there are losses, as no process is 100% efficient. Not all the potential energy stored behind a dam and allowed to flow down the penstock gets converted to electricity. Not all the electricity flowing to a light bulb gets converted to lumens. Not all the energy stored in a pound of jet fuel gets converted to thrust. Throughout human history we have taken one or another form of abundant, economically available energy and converted it into something that we determined was more valuable to us...cooked meat, artificial light, a trip on a Boeing to be with the family at Thanksgiving, whatever. The remaining energy content of the final result has ALWAYS been less than what we started with. Yet that never seems to have deterred us. And to suggest that now or in the foreseeable future that it should, or it will, flies in the face of human experience since the discovery of fire.

[Slimprofits]

Re: Reporting gross oil production to hide the collapse of net oil production

A word of warning on "The Quest": The Daniel Yergin who wrote "The Prize" 20 years ago approached the topic as a disinterested scholar. The Daniel Yergin who wrote "The Quest" works for the oil industry.

I found this Amazon review helpful: "As someone with fifty-five years of work on energy economics, I find his book a disgrace. It relies on dubious sources and ignores the vast relevant economic literature. It is disorganized. It is padded with historical background of dubious relevance. Anecdotes substitute for reasoned analysis. This particularly true of his treatment of the dangers of importing oil. The jumble of descriptions fails to produce a coherent discussion of the problem and the appropriate approach. This is inexcusable because many coherent discussions are available. These include, but are far from limited to, my decades of work in the area. His discussion of environmental issues in the last three parts of the book has the fatal flaw of first recognizing the folly of picking winners and promoting them by edicts, tax credits, and subsidies and then proceeding to write approvingly of countless measures that in fact try to pick winners by imposing such policies. [My fuller review is in press for publication in Regulation.] In most key areas, he almost always reaches the wrong conclusion. The big exception is that he rejects peak-oil concerns, but his rational is unacceptable feeble." - Richard L. Gordon

Thank you for the tip, EJ!

[GRG55]

Re: Reporting gross oil production to hide the collapse of net oil production

Bingo! EROEI is just the latest nonsense being promulgated by those that prefer we believe in the apocalyptic peak oil scenario instead of peak cheap oil. The idea that the world is "short" of energy, or that somehow the world is "running out of energy" is so utterly ludicrous that I am beyond wasting any more time debating it with people.

Crude oil as a feedstock to make refined liquid transportation fuels is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to find, produce, transport, refine and distribute. And therefore it is becoming increasingly valued over other uses for crude oil derivatives (such as generating electricity). If there was an opportunity to take a cheap and abundant (and perhaps even "renewable") source of energy and use it as an input for the exploration, development and production of crude oil who cares what the EROEI is?

We aren't running out of energy, we are just slowly running out of cheap sources of a particularly important and highly valued form of energy that currently has no single equivalent substitute.

...

After years of debating EROEI with peak oil doomers, I've given up. I'm not sure what their agenda is but it isn't to develop an understanding of the political and economic impact of diminishing availability of cheaply produceable oil.

It makes sense at least theoretically to convert the energy in an abundant fixed energy source such as uranium into a transportation fuel like diesel by using nuclear power to heat water to produce steam to convert shale rock into crude oil (pyrolysis) that can be refined into diesel. However, mining shale rock and then converting it into liquids costs more than pumping crude from reservoirs. In fact any alternative to oil that's mined out of reservoirs of oil buried in the ground is necessarily more expensive to produce due to all of the extra capital and energy consuming steps involved. By the same token, oil mined from reservoirs at the bottom of the ocean also are more expensive to mine than shallow land-based reservoirs, and as the latter are rapidly depleting and the former are all that's left, the world's remaining oil endowment will be increasingly expensive to produce. This, as I've told the Peak Oil doomers since 2006, is why I coined the phrase Peak Cheap Oil. There will always be oil but starting in 1998 markets started to price in the reality that oil will be increasingly more expensive to produce -- forever -- albeit with periods of price declines when demand falls due to recession, some of which recessions will be triggered by oil price shocks.

While EROEI is a nonsense concept, profit is not. If E&P costs for a particular shale field including the cost of building and operating a nuclear power plant are higher than potential revenues then it will not be produced that way. I haven't done the math but I suspect that the economics of nukes-to-oil energy won't work until oil prices are two or three times current levels.

Now that North America has achieved the inevitable (temporary!) glut in crude oil, the EROEIers seem to have fallen silent. Are they regrouping for another junk economics assault? Or have they come around to the realization that in America everything is possible if you throw enough money at it?

From another thread about shale oil 08-09-13

Nice summary overall. But the woe-is-us crowd is missing (or wants to overlook) the fact that the USA is at the forefront of developing and applying these technologies, and it is changing the energy, industrial economy, political, financial and monetary landscape of the United States...and potentially, in due course, the world. Costs are coming down, days to drill a well are coming down, solutions are being developed to reduce the flaring and conserve the associated gas, frac techniques are improving dramatically...all of this suggests a ways to go before it peters out.

[Polish_Silver]

Energy vs Oil

Now that North America has achieved the inevitable (temporary!) glut in crude oil, the EROEIers seem to have fallen silent. Are they regrouping for another junk economics assault? Or have they come around to the realization that in America everything is possible if you throw enough money at it?

From another thread about shale oil 08-09-13

I think the distinction between "energy" of any type, and highly concentrated liquid fuel, suitable for automotive transportation, has not been articulated sufficiently.

We are still wasting lots of energy, of all types. Where I live many people (including me) have electrically powered water heaters, which I think could be economically replaced by solar thermal systems.

Meanwhile most cars which are built to carry 4 passengers travel with just the driver inside. We will know fuel is scarce when almost every car has at least two people. The biggest barrier to driving an auto is not the fuel price, but the traffic !

[sunskyfan]

Re: Reporting gross oil production to hide the collapse of net oil production

Interesting revisit. Thanks. Perhaps the EROREIers (as you call them) made the mistake of many in the modern economy of assuming a Dollar is as real as a barrel of oil. The Fed says it costs 5 cents to create a dollar bill and it costs 12.5 cents to create a $100 bill. Does anybody think that if it costs 105 cents to create a Dollar bill or $120 to create a $100 bill they would stop creating money? In other words if I can create $1,000 worth of economic activity out of a barrel of oil that costs less than $1,000 to produce I will buy that oil UNLESS there is an alternative that allows me to create $1001 worth of activity for that same $1000. Sometimes people fixate on an opimization problem with a current premise (Engineers as a group are particularly good examples) to the point of ignoring that changing the premise might get you where you want to go .