Renewable Revolution

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Tell me, do you think the fossil fuel industry could afford to pay the $44 an hour or more that it NOW does on their fracking and land and ocean oil rigs if they had to capture, process and defang the carcinogenic and otherwise toxic gases they now flare?

Obviously it would be more expensive and energy-intensive to capture and process the crap they flare.  In fact there would be a rising cost as the %age of crap cleaned up rose from 1% to 100% - just like the cost of burning coal with CCS goes up, and only 30% clean up is a target too far.  Believe me, I'm not in favour of doing that.  I want all that stopped, even though it means civilisation collapsing. 

But please don't tell me we can all have solar panels and batteries and electric cars, when none of that new infrastructure can be manufactured without using FFs to power the building phase.

You've thrown quite a few red herrings in there - nutritional content doesn't apply if we're only going to produce ethanol for fuel, and the energy density of ethanol versus gasoline when used in vehicle engines doesn't enter into the ERoEI of making Litres of ethanol.

I was once friends with the chief accountant of an Australian sugar mill, and he was invited over to see the Brazilian sugar industry first hand.  The Australian sugar industry went all mechanised after WW2, and has a sophisticated rail system for getting wet cane to the mill.  They use the waste bagasse to fire the boilers, and to cogenerate a little surplus electricity while the mill is running.  Everything is highly researched and documented to produce the maximum profit.  His impressions of Brazil, where cane is still cut by hand, and moved by donkey carts to very small local mills/fermenters, was that it was outright slavery.  The internet is full of sites that back that up.

A model of that would be very different to a model for how it would be done in US/Australia.  I'm only talking about the latter, and I'm open to directing all the sugars to the fermenters, in fact it would be simpler without the co-product of crystallized sugar, despite not being financially the best thing to do.

>  "I am willing to attempt to quantify each and every energy and environmental downside that ANY Renewable energy technology has."

That's all we need to do for the first try.  The way spreadsheets work means that you can always use X for anything difficult to quantify, and run it with X=low value and X=high value and see if it makes a big difference to the outcome.  I don't know whether gas flaring makes much of a difference or not to the final outcome, but let's see shall we?

I did not throw any "red herrings". The ENERGY needed to take something (plant grown or mineral extracted) and make it DO something involves everything I mentioned. There are widely different ENERGY COST ramifications to the use of the SAME energy source in DIFFERENT ways. That isn't a "red herring"; it's a function of complex systems. Do you have problems with a SLIDING SCALE of ERoEI's for the SAME fuel? I don't. 

That is interesting about Brazil, but considering you quoted a ridiculously low ERoEI number for sugarcane recently, I harbor no illusions about how you feel about that. Ethanol ERoEI is different for every plant feed stock used. And some plant feed stocks can be eaten by people and/or animals or burned after drying, making the proportional use of that plant for the process of obtaining ethanol/food/cellulose combustibles important in determining the energy extracted from a gram of said plant. If I use ALL of a sugar beet crop for ethanol production, the ERoEI of said ethanol will be HIGHER than if I used one third of it because the mechanical plant and equipment, as well as the cost of growing the beet crop, remain the same while the kilos of beets to be processed are reduced.

But you KNOW all this! That is why every time I have these conversations with you, I get the distinct impression that you are playing dumb.      Nevertheless, we will get to that AFTER we agree on the formula for obtaining ERoEI's for fossil fuels. Are we communicating?

You keep wanting to bring the subject to Renewable energy WITHOUT talking about fossil fuels. WHAT is your problem. Palloy?

I have to go now. I'll be back tomorrow.

Here's the last news for today  :
Staff Writers  January 21, 2016   

Two more U.S. independents announced new rounds of layoffs this week as upstreams continue to grapple with low oil prices.

According to Reuters, Houston-based Southwestern Energy will cut 1,100 employees, or about 40 percent of its workforce.    

The company plans to take a pre-tax charge of between $60 million to $70 million in the first quarter tied to the reductions.

A timeline for the reductions has not been disclosed yet.

Southwestern told Reuters on Thursday  it expects the cuts, along with a smaller round of cuts last August, to save the company between $150 million to $175 million per year.

Shares of Southwestern Energy have fallen by about 70 percent year-over year, Reuters added.

In Oklahoma, Devon Energy is preparing for a round of lay offs this quarter as the company looks to trim costs.

Devon Energy told NewsOK that it is “clear that layoffs will be a necessary part of the company’s near-term cost-management efforts.”    

The Oklahoma-based company has not disclosed how large the reductions will be, but the firm said it expects to “the majority” of its planned cuts to occur by the end of the first quarter.

Devon, an independent exploration and production firm, produced about 214,400 barrels of crude per day in 2014 along with about 1.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day and about 120,000 barrels of natural gas liquids per day.

The company holds acres in the Permian Basin, Barnett shale play, Anadarko Basin, the Rocky Mountains and Eagle Ford Basin.

Devon Energy also has heavy oil assets in Canada.
http://petroglobalnews.com/2016/01/southwestern-energy-axing-40-percent-staff-devon-energy-plans-cuts/