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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (7422)	4/16/2008 10:00:36 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24233

Unconventional Oil: Tar Sands and Shale Oil - EROI on the Web, Part 3 of 5 Posted by Nate Hagens on April 15, 2008 - 11:00am This is 3rd in a series of 5 guest posts by Professor Charles Hall of the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry describing the energy statistic, "EROI" for various fuels. As has been discussed often on this site, net energy analysis is a vitally important concept - just as we primarily care about our take home pay which is our salary minus the taxes, we should care about our 'take home' energy, which is what is left after energy costs have been accounted for. As important as it is, this measure is not easy to quantify, as: a)data is almost always measured in $ as opposed to energy terms, b) parsing non-energy inputs (and outputs) into energy terms is difficult, and c) analysis boundaries (including environmental impacts) are very disparate. As such, there is not (has not yet been) a consistent formula for EROI applied to all energy studies that has led to policymakers and analysts speaking the same language in useful ways. The lead paper in this months Royal Academy of Sweden's journal AMBIO will be about such an EROI framework, and we will link to it when it comes online. Professor Hall has been working in this area for over 30 years. Below are net energy analysis from Hall's group on the unconventional oil sources from tar sands and oil shale - two resources that theoretically are enormous in energy scale, but practically are limited by flow rates, costs, and externalities. Just how limited is the subject of todays post below the fold. Results By our admittedly incomplete calculations the EROI depends mostly upon the direct energy used and which alone suggests an EROI of about 5.8:1(Figure 1). Including indirect energy decreases the EROI to about 5.2:1, and adding in labor and environmental costs have little effect. A comparison with the limited other data out there indicates that our analysis generates a somewhat higher EROI than others (Table 1). Nevertheless it appears that tar sands mining yields a significantly positive EROI. CONCLUSION In conclusion, tar sands are an economically and energetically viable, although hardly ideal, approach to maintaining liquid fuel supplies. The most severe problem is probably their local and global environmental impact, and they are already impacting Canadian CO2 releases significantly. But the tar sands are unlikely to make a large impact on overall supply of liquid fuels because their supply is likely to be rate, rather than total resource limited. If the maximum rate were to grow to about 2 billion barrels a year this would approximately meet Canada’s demand and could leave relatively little for export if Canada’s production of conventional oil continues to decline. Achieving even this rate of production from tar sands is uncertain because of growing concerns about environmental impacts downstream and insufficient hydrogen and water. There's more… (8067 words) theoildrum.com