Corporate America is based on maximum profit margins. Oil Shales will have no interest as long as much cheaper conventional crude oil and tar sands oil are available.

If internal energy is excluded, and only purchased energy is used as input, then the EROI calculated is in the range of 2 to 16.

While one could argue that the char and gas produced and consumed within the shale conversion process has zero opportunity cost—i.e., that energy would not, or could not, be used somewhere else in the economy, so it should not be treated as a “cost”—the authors note, “the internal energy is absolutely necessary to accurately assess greenhouse gas emissions”.

This is all one needs to see, here again a “environmental study group” fiddling with the numbers to produce a result they like its called cherry picking in science. The internal energy is irrelevant from a fiscal point of view there for irrelevant to a corporations accounting ROI. Shells in-situ process with purchased off peak power has a break even price of $45 bbl ish and a positive EROI. The ultimate EROI matters not if you can turn a profit on it. If you can make profits then a company will exploit the resource its that simple. Same can be said for Ethanol corn ethanol has an ultimate EROI of 1.2:1 when all the inputs of diesel, natural gas to distill and fossil based fertilizers are accounted for and billions of gallons are made a year for profit.

Another way of looking at it would be you are taking a energy resource that is unusable and unstorable in the current energy market and converting it to something that is storable and useable in the current liquid infrastructure. Yes you can store electricity but it is currently very expensive to do so, and bat tech is just not economical for mass ev or power leveling probably wont be for another decade. The cheapest off peak power comes from nukes or wind currently using Shell’s process even at a EROI of 1:1 which its not its over 10:1 from there test literature you are converting energy that would otherwise be dumped in the case of wind power it’s use it to useful liquid fuels at a ten to one ratio of purchaced energy. The hold up is not technology its environmental lobby groups keeping the leases from being commercially exploited. Shell’s process works and works well.

I find his punctuation fine and his information interesting. Welcome to the site TX.

EP's comment above about crude-to-product yields is in line with my understanding as well. I also agree about relative easy of energy storage via CAES -- although the design that makes the most sense to me and would be most cost-effective seems to have eluded the established players. I may yet have to create a start-up...

TXGeologist is right, though, that the way to view shale oil is not as an energy resource, but as a way to produce storable liquid fuel from surplus energy from other sources: off-peak nuclear or excess wind or solar. Its yield per kwHr, based on estimations I've seen from Shell, is about 3x higher than for fuel synthesized from CO2 and water.

It makes sense to go that route, if you happen to believe that CO2-induced global warming is a giant hoax perpetuated through a conspiracy of government bureaucrats, climate scientists, and liberal "tree-hugger" environmentalists. Which perhaps TXGeologist does.

I don't, however. For me it isn't a matter of blindly trusting NASA researchers and the IPCC. It's a matter of physics that I understand. So oil from shale *should* be taxed with its high carbon cost. If it is, it becomes non-competetive with fuel synthesized from water and biomass. The latter yields almost as much fuel per kwHr as high grade oil shale, and is carbon-neutral.

Sure you can include self-energy as an input, as it means a portion of the energy in the resource is consumed and can no longer be recovered.

Wow, that is a really convoluted way of saying that shale oil extraction is very energy intensive and may have a big carbon footprint.

I have seen in many places what seems to be a total misuse of this EROI metric. People claim it's the proof of many things and than would refuse to reason about it.

Even though I'm not from the field, I understand it is a modeling of reality that selects potential thermal energy as a focus point and abstracts everything else.

It's use is conceivable for certain comparisons and should point to POSSIBLE best investments of energy to recover more energy, or the suitability of some material and it's related process as an "energy source".

As it abstracts cost (in $), form, convenience, locale, toxicity, etc. it has no value in evaluating those aspects and a more general purpose applicability.

Problem is not EROI (EROEI), but with the overloading of the "symbol" with differing definitions and expectations trying to find results far out of the limits of the model.

(As an exercise, just try estimating the cost in dollars of a certain amount of energy in BTUs coming from coal, grid-electricity, and oil to see the difference ... and then tell someone in a MARKET economy they are equal ... in BTUe).

One shocking example is the claim that corn-ethanol is useless and a farce cause it's EROI is just a disputable low amount... (0.5..2.0).

Even if it cost some more energy in the FORM or coal (or natural gas) that is LOCAL and COSTs less then alternative heat sources and delivers less energy in the FORM of an appropriate liquid fuel usable in an Otto cycle engine at a COST competitive with gasoline derived from IMPORTED oil, what does EROI has to do with this ? Nothing. EROI just shows you can't rely on corn as your primary source of energy. Is it news ? No!

The way this interpretative conclusion have been extended far away from the model, tomorrow somebody will start a boycott on AA batteries cause there EROI ...

That said, lets not forget we still need to conserve energy and find and harness appropriate primary energy sources.

While one could argue that the char and gas produced and consumed within the shale conversion process has zero opportunity cost—i.e., that energy would not, or could not, be used somewhere else in the economy, so it should not be treated as a “cost”—the authors note, “the internal energy is absolutely necessary to accurately assess greenhouse gas emissions”.

This statement typifies the kind pseudo-intellectual nonsense which surrounds the use of EROI as an economic parameter. If you want to characterize the greenhouse gas intensity of oil shale production then you should directly calculate this intensity rather than kluging up some energy ratio whose relationship to the relevant physical parameter is not clear. However, the use of EROI lends an air intellectual profundity to discussions of "biophysical economics" so that people insist on using it whether or not it is appropriate to the particular issue at hand.

Although energy balance is obviously relevant to the economics of energy production EROI is not in and of itself an economic parameter. It is easy to invent an example where a process with an EROI of 1.5 economically outperforms a process with an EROI of 20. If you examine assumptions of such an example (or any example of energy production when properly considered) you will see that economics are determined by the total resource cost of producing a given quantity of net energy. All of non-energy related costs such labor, fresh water, land use, etc. must be considered. These non-energy costs are not secondary factors. There exists no limit in which they can be neglected.

If one makes the assumption that the non-energy related resource cost scales with the input energy with universal constant of proportionality, then you can show that EROI-1 (which I call NEROI, since it is the ratio of net energy output to input energy) can by used as a proxy for the resource efficiency of energy production. The use of EROI rather than NEROI shows that the people who do net energy analysis have not thought carefully enough about the problem to even get the arithmetic correct. Furthermore the assumption of a universal constant of proportionality between input energy and total resource cost is undoubtedly not correct.

Of course translating physcial resource costs (labor, fresh water, land use, etc) into a bottom line economic cost which allows comparsion between different energy producing processes involves you in the full complexity of how value is assigned to various resources in an overall economic system with many subtle interconnnections and interdependencies. This necessity is very distressing to people who have fallen in love with the idea of doing economic analysis by calculating dimensionless energy ratios, and so they insist on hanging on to the chimaerical simplicity offered by EROI.

It is very easy for the oil companies and other oil speculators to put hidden money into research and publications that propose that oil is better than alternative fuels. If all the energy needed to produce ethanol came from the corn field, ethanol would not be produced. Even now fewer green house gases would be produced if all the corn field areas used for ethanol production were used for growing permanent large trees, and more petroleum was used for automobiles instead.

Much if not most manufacturing of products sold in the US has moved to China partly because China uses cheap coal and is not afraid of building nuclear power plants because the false fears promoted by US politicians paid by the oil companies do not exist in China.

The US cannot truly belive that it can rely on very expensive solar and wind energy and agricultural fuels and have its economy work.

What most people ignore is the cost of the fuel to the people and then the cost of the fuel to the US or other nations' national economy.

Since there is a tax on imported ethanol, there should be a tax of at least $50 on imported crude oil. This will make the production of liquid fuels from coal and oil shale forever cost effective.

CO2 is captured and sold and put into the earth by Dakota Gasification from the coal they burn to make natural gas and fertilizers. Production of commercial fuels from oil shale can do the same.

Since the US government has little knowledge of the oil spills and oil use and gas flaring and production use of crude oil before it gets into the US, the carbon footprint of imported oil is not known and cannot be determined. This makes any comparisons of the carbon footprints of the use of any fuels in the US with imported oil useless or even fraudulent. Even the efficienncy of its use has a great bearing.

Those who worry about carbon footprints should worry about co-generation which right now is the fastest and cheapest way to reduce the carbon footprint of any country.

France has proved that nuclear energy clearly reduces CO2 production, cost effectively. Using one pound of retired bomb uranium or plutonium prevents the release of about ten million pounds of CO2. ..HG..