The Strange Energy Budget of Ethanol Production

joeflies writes "The San Francisco Chronicle published an article regarding research on how much fuel is required to make Ethanol. The results indicate that it make take 6 times more energy than the end product delivers."

Comments

Re:Hmm

[jericho4.0]

" How much petroleum goes into petroleum production?"

Good question. In the early days of oil production, it took one barrel of oil to get ~50. Oil was easy to pump (not very deep), and of high quality (pick and choose your oilfield). Nowadays, one barrel of oil gets you somewhere around 5, less in some fields. The big exceptions to this are a few, very large, oilfields in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the former Soviet states. Some might find some insight into recent US foreign policy here.

Return On Energy is being affected by several factors. Oil is now deeper and stickier, and takes lots of force to suck out of the ground. The gushers have gushed. It is also of lower quality, and more energy is required to refine it.

The ROE calculation for a particular oilfield is difficult to do. Oil producers are very secretive about some numbers, so the margin of error is significant. But what is clear is that the ROE is dropping, and will continue to drop. When it hits 1:1, oil becomes useless.

I think the most interesting thing about this, is that we won't know until after the fact. Suddenly the worker will not have enough paycheck to get gas to go to work in the factory that makes refinery bits, or some convulted economic chain like that. Another reason the calculation is so hard to do.

If we were having an oil deathpool, I would guess 15 years.