“It may sometimes be expedient for a man to heat the stove with his furniture. But he should not delude himself by believing that he has discovered a wonderful new method of heating his premises.” — Ludwig von Mises
Mises was an economist, but his analogy applies even better to the science of geology, since the quote above is included in a book I’m reading, Oil 101 by Morgan Downey.
More specifically, the quote is inserted right at the end of the introductory chapter in a section on EROEI. EROEI stands for energy returned on energy invested, which is likely the most critical concept to be aware of in the age of $80 a barrel oil.
In a nutshell, it means that you can’t have something for nothing, and we always tend to go for the easy stuff first.
With regard to oil, it means that for every barrel we pump out of the ground, it takes energy to operate the pump, and energy to drill the hole in the first place, and energy to find out where to drill the hole in the first place, and energy to refine the oil and, well, you get my drift.
In the early days of oil production, there were places like Texas and Saudi Arabia and Leduc.
There was also high-quality oil underground that was pressurized and just waiting for some enterprising soul to stick a straw down into the earth and reap the rewards.
In those days, the EROEI was about 100 to 1, which meant that with the energy contained in a single barrel of oil, you could get 100 barrels of the stuff out of the earth and refine it and bring it to market.
These days, Downey estimates the EROEI for conventional oil is closer to 15 to 1, and that of the tar sands is less than 4 to 1.
We sometimes hear about the incredible bounty of oil shale, but the ratio for that is less than 1 to 1, which means that only an idiot would invest in this source of energy, or someone with a government grant.
Likewise, there is the much-touted “coal to liquids” technology.
It also has a ratio of less than 1 to 1, but if you have lots of coal and you’re desperate (as the Nazi’s were during Second World War or the South African apartheid regime was during the economic embargo), you’ll do it anyway.
As for biofuels, very rough estimates for EROEI range from eight to one for ethanol from sugar cane grown in Brazil to a mere 1.2 to 1 for the same fuel distilled from American corn (courtesy of government grants). Biodiesel is somewhere in the middle at 3 to 1.
Solar? Wind?
Google them and EROEI and you’ll get a range of answers, partly because the variables are huge and partly because society hasn’t yet bothered to do a lot of comprehensive studies on the matter.
We’re still living a head-in-the-sand lifestyle based on the last dregs of easy Middle Eastern crude, so why bother to find out how our children and grandchildren will fare?
To use the Mises analogy, we are barely aware of the stove in the corner, and even less aware of the fuel that sustains it. We are currently shoveling tar into it, heating the American’s house next door, and breaking our backs doing it.
But maybe it’s time to think about the condition of the rest of the house. Maybe it’s time to increase the insulation in the attic.
Maybe it’s time to put on a damn sweater. Maybe it’s time we started to seriously think about energy conservation.
Evan Bedford is a local environmentalist. Direct comments, questions and suggestions to wyddfa23@telus.net. Visit the Energy and Ecology website at www.evanbedford.com