“Denials of ecological limits resemble anosognosia (inability of stroke patients to recognize their paralysis). Some denial literature resembles their confabulations (elaborate unreal stories concocted as rationalizations.)” —William R. Catton, “The Problem of Denial“.
Ron Patterson
I have watched with some amusement how folks are talking about Energy Returned On Energy Invested (EROEI) and are talking right past each other, neither apparently understanding what the other is talking bout. What about wind or solar energy in? Should that be considered? What about time? Must one´s time be considered in the equation?
Ladies and Gentlemen, please! Let us step back and clear the air. Let us look at the entire forest and stop getting bogged down by quibbling over the damn individual trees. Here are the questions: Can a given method of producing energy production be made economical and sustainable? Can that method replace a significant amount of the energy now provided by the two fossil fuels soon to be in decline, oil and natural gas? In other words, will this damn scheme work? And….even if it does work, how much difference will it make in the big picture.
Don´t get me wrong, it is great that you are attempting to do the arithmetic, but do the arithmetic that matters and don´t get bogged down in arithmetic that does not amount to a hill of beans.
Okay, can wind energy be economically produced, and….if so, can this wind energy effectively replace oil in the way it is used today? That is, can we economically produce something from wind energy that we can power our cars, trucks and tractors with? Can we fly an airplane with wind energy? How about solar energy? Can we plow, plant and harvest with solar or wind energy and if so, how much food or fiber will we get out for the amount of money and energy we put into the project? In other words gentlemen, will wind or solar energy save the world from total collapse when petroleum goes into steep decline? Can we feed six or seven billion people from the energy, fertilizer, and pesticides produced by solar or wind energy?
A reality check is due here. What would it cost to manufacture all these windmills and solar panels? What would it cost to manufacture the infrastructure required to turn this electrical energy into something portable like hydrogen? What would be the cost of construction of these gigantic projects? What would be the maintenance costs to keep the scheme operating once it was in place?
And how about the unforeseen problems? Wind and storms will occasionally rip your solar panels apart? How much have you budgeted for repair? And a biggie for all you solar rollers, how much have you budgeted for dust removal? In the dry desert where it seldom rains, dust piles up on everything. This will block the sunlight and render your solar panels useless. Washing down thousands of square miles of solar panels would require more water than flows over Niagara Falls, precious water that is not available in any desert area.
Of course you could never know the true costs for all these energy-producing schemes until you tried them. Then I fear you would find the costs immense and the true portable energy produced miniscule. But, based on work already done, we can do a little back of the envelope accounting.
In 1990 The California Energy Commission estimated that hydrogen could be produced by electrolysis of water at a cost of about $18 per million BTU. This figure based on an assumed cost of electric power at five cents a kilowatt-hour, which was the national average in 1990. But this cost of $18 per million BTU compares with 1990 cost which utilities paid for a million BTU which was $1.46 for coal, $2.32 per million BTU for natural gas, and $3.38 per million BTU for oil and related liquids. (Youngquist, ìGeoDestinies”. Page 259.
Today, using cheap coal powered electricity for electrolysis, hydrogen BTUs are over twelve times the cost of coal BTUs. So as long as we have coal to burn we can produce hydrogen at approximately five and one half times the cost of oil. ($18 as compared to $2.32.) But using coal to produce hydrogen, to replace existing oil would mean several additional things, none of which are good. It would mean that we would have to build hundreds of new coal-fired power plants. It would mean a dramatic increase in greenhouse gases and air polluting, disease causing, acid rain causing pollutants such as sulphur dioxide. It would mean a dramatic increase in strip mining and all the earth scarring and pollution resulting from that. And it would mean that the peak in coal production would be moved forward to perhaps less than fifty years as compared to a hundred and fifty to two hundred years at present.
So, I believe that leave out coal, at least as a major producer for hydrogen, that leaves solar power and/or wind energy. That would dramatically increase the cost from five to six times the cost of oil to ten to twenty times the cost of oil, at least. That is, if it can be produced with a positive EROEI at all, which is extremely doubtful.
So stop dreaming gentlemen, neither solar power nor wind power comes even close to being an effective replacement for petroleum or natural gas. It simply will not work; this will not save us from a catastrophic collapse when the supply of oil starts to drop.
Ah but there are still biofuels! Yes, that is the ticket, biofuels!
NO! That is an even worse alternative. But that is another subject for another post.
Reposted from Energy Resources Yahoo Group