PROF DISSES EROEI STATS

NewEnergyNews is Jack-of-all-energies and Master-of-no-statistics but this guy’s vehemence is misplaced. Net Energy (aka EROEI and EROI, according to Robert Rapier, though others distinguish between the acronyms) is a very useful tool, though it may not be the tool for every job.

The delicious contentiousness on this issue is reminiscent of the 1980s resistance of traditional baseball statisticians to the Sabremetrics Bill James was then brilliantly inventing. Now everybody knows that runs produced, slugging percentage and on-base percentage are more important stats than a mere home run number.

There is more money in energy than baseball, so it will no doubt take the energy world longer to come around than it did baseball.

Net energy – a useless, misleading and dangerous metric, says expert
Jennifer Beal, 8 August 2007 (EurekAlert)

WHO
Professor Bruce Dale, Michigan State University

Graphic explanation of EROEI, or Net Energy. (click to enlarge)

WHAT
Professor Dale argues that Net Energy (aka EROI and EROEI) is “dead wrong… dangerously misleading and must be removed” from the discourse on energy choices.

WHEN
This is part of an ongoing search for ways of assessing an evolving New Energy future.

There is a website. (click to enlarge)

WHERE
Dale’s views were published in the 1st edition of Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefining.

WHY
- Sample EROI analysis by Cutler Cleveland: Ten Fundamental Principles of Net Energy
- Net Energy is a metric by which forms of energy can be compared. There are other metrics.
- With oil prices rising and oil supplies failing to meet demands, it is useful to be able to evaluate other sources of energy.
- Dale’s complaint about net energy is that it assumes all sources of energy have equal value but markets clearly value gas, petrol and electricity much more than coal. Dale believes it would be better to calculate how much petroleum an energy would displace or how much emission it generated.
- Dale calculations: 1 MJ of ethanol displaces 28 MJ of petroleum; corn ethanol cuts emissions 18% from petroleum; cellulosic ethanol cuts emissions 88% from petroleum.
- Energy authority Robert Rapier: “The EROEI, (Energy Returned on Energy Invested), EROI, and energy return all refer to the same idea. It is the ratio of usable energy returned from a process divided by the energy expended (consumed) in the production process. Or, simply put, if I expend a total of 1 BTU of energy in a process that yields 5 BTUs of energy, the EROEI is 5/1…This is an area rife with misunderstand and garbled definitions. Depending on where the system boundaries are drawn, one can come up with very different definitions…”

The Net Energy calculation proving wind energy's viability. (click to enlarge)

QUOTES
- Rapier: “In reality, EROEI is a part of the overall evaluation, but by itself does not tell you much…Consider that your goal is merely to make money. You may be able to make lots of money with a process having an EROEI of less than 1. You can take a pound of BTU of coal and use it in an ethanol process to make less than a BTU of ethanol. Considering only your energy inputs, you have increased the value of your BTUs by a factor of 10. So, even if you take 1 BTU of coal and convert that into 0.7 BTUs of ethanol, there may be plenty of economic incentive to do it, despite the energy returns…EROEI matters. Sometimes. And as a part of the overall context.”
- Dale: “Clear thinking shows that we value the services that energy can perform, not the energy per se, so it would be better to compare fuels by the services that each provides…not on a straight energy basis…which is likely to be irrelevant and misleading…”