Energy balance issues

that it takes more energy to make a gallon of ethanol than the energy contained in a gallon of ethenol.

Surely this must apply to everything? Else we'd be in the old 'over unity' territory?

Del

Ahhhh don't forget Del, petrol is FREE!! it just bubbles up out of the ground and into your automotive vehicle tank!!!

Same as gas really.... Ummmmmm

John

In other words How should we know?

An interesting question, one which the water dissolution arguments had got me pondering.

As somebody, who although unschooled, at least not formally, I would say that the issue is not so much as one of how much energy, but rather what kind of energy.

It really makes no sense to create fuels out of corn if by doing so you are increasing the cost of corn to the point where starvation becomes the rule for folks who depended on it as primary to their diet and who cannot afford other foods.

The argument as to grain has been around for some time in that feeding food grains to animals to produce meat is considered by some wasteful.

I would suggest, merely suggest at this point because I have not yet worked it out in my mind, that the energy that creates any commodity, energy ones as well, is at base, human energy.

Obviously, an apple hanging on a tree is worth nothing and is not energy until it is picked, at least, to eat.

I would suggest as well that the only beast on the face of the earth as can produce more energy with a day's labor than it requires to live that day is the human beast.

That's the key to the issue but there is a long trail to consider to get from there to the question as to bio-fuels or what are really ancient bio-fuels, the remnants buried in the earth of earlier biologicals, animal or vegetable.

Just a thought.

j.

G.A. However Buckminster Fuller did some calculations that showed that the cost of gasoline from ground to pump was incredibly huge. Something on the order of one million dollars if taken on a per gallon basis.

Dragon

Please source, i.e., where are you quoting from.

j.

"I would suggest as well that the only beast on the face of the earth as can produce more energy with a day's labor than it requires to live that day is the human beast."

Jack - a little science goes a long way. 900 million 3rd world farmers are feeding their horses, and getting more labor from the horses pulling plows than they would get from giving the same amount of "feed" to human beasts, and using the humans to pull their plows. Since most 3rd worlders are not big meat eaters, you could feed the humans the same dollar value in rice each day as the dollar value of the hay for the horse, to make it a totally fair as a comparison.

By "unschooled", I'm guessing you didn't take a highschool physics class, so the apple thing may need a non-technical explanation: The human race could totally exterminate itself tomorrow, and Mother Nature would not give a darn. All the energy flows would continue without us: solar energy heating ice and melting it, the gravity-induced energy of falling objects would be identical with or without humans. A rockslide down a cliff would still crush the trees it lands on at the bottom of the slide.

As the human body can be considered to be a walking chemistry set, where the things we stuff in our mouths participate in chimical reactions inside our stomachs, intestines and corpuscles, we do convert some stuff to energy inside us. On a global scale, personal energy is trivial. However, it does not take much energy to strike a match. Throw the lighted match into a natural methane vent, and you will "activate" the release of millions of BTUs of energy from stuff Mother Nature left lying around for us to find. Our puny little efforts can re-locate and release energy, but only because Mother Nature has left it all over (and under) the place for us to find it.

Actually I did take high school physics. Chemistry too. And a whole lot of other stuff at Brooklyn Technical High School. Don't be misled by the name it was an engineering and sciences preparatory high school.

As to humans and work. Those horses wouldn't do a lick of work of benefit to humans save the humans did a lot of work working them. No beast would.

What I was trying to do was follow the path of how human labor displaces energy sources to its own advantage and sometimes profit.

j.

Hi Guest, It is a no-win situation however which way you look at it when it comes to energy conversion!

Spencer.

Well first you have to spent energy to find the oil (may include dry holes).

Moving the drilling rig to site, setting up the rig, and drilling the hole. Include manufacture of drilling mud, well casting, drill stem, as well as the rig, transportation of drilling personnel.

Then you have the pumps, pipe lines, trucks, ships, then storage tanks, refineries, and the distribution and storage of the finished product.

Maybe 60%?

I just read in newspaper that some old couples in U.S are leaving big cities and going back to their old town cottages.They have started building stocks of wood and food stuff etc.They feel that oil crisis will bring big disaster very soon.They are preparing for days when there is no oil or food.Like old primitive life.

Are we going in that direction?.Well if OPEC still sits tight on production and allows prices of crude to sky rocket then this type of consumer resistance will bring down the demand and finally bring down the crude oil prices. Price is controlled by demand if demand falls naturally prices will fall.

We should learn a lesson by drastically controlling consumption of the petroleum products by driving lesser miles, sharing cars for work, using public transport, using MRT for long drives, avoiding plane travels by video conferencing and so on.............

I am sure in no time OPEC countries will feel pinch and prices of crude oil will crash down in no time. Also future trading in oil should be totally banned.

I am sure fellow members are with me on this burning issue of to-day.

Suresh Sharma.

Having been among the earlier ones to recognize what will be a need for some modicum of regression (ranging from inconvenient to catastrophic), I now see more and more hints of public acknowledgement of the inevitability of some amount of history reversal. This would not apply so much to a culture as in India but, in the U.S. I think we will begin to see more and more stories about growing/raising one's own food...perhaps even references to the victory gardens during the world war years.

Hi Guest.

Here in the West and East Midlands the renting of allotments has trebled in the last 5 years as more and more people grow their own vegetables, I know of four families who have replaced the flowers in their gardens with vegetable crops, front as well as back gardens'

Of couse not everyone can do this, but there has become a lively bartering system localy, and no taxes to pay either on deals. One of my friends who is an expert on DIY gets all of his vegetables and fruit in exchange for small jobs, I do the same by helping people with their small plumbing jobs.

I believe this will happen more often in the future as the price of food and everything else go's up and up.

Spencer.

Thanks, Scalopie, and a very interesting post.

Your avatar, and the reference to "Midlands" threw me at first, until I looked it up. Two interesting aspects of your allotment programs come to mind: the effect on "crop" selection and growing season under the warming effects of urban dust domes; and the issue of irrigation run-off. Since London is a riverine city, how do local regulations there deal with the issues of run-off and of fertilizers and pesticides use on cultivated allotments?

A big problem here (Calif.), I would say, has to do with the perception that arable land is unlimited...which in turn has led to the destructive conversion of vast tracts of farmland for one of the most environmentally harmful land uses: oversized single family houses. Now, we here find that much of the recent destruction has been for naught, even for avaricious local politicians looking for tax base expansion, as repossessed new houses by the thousands stand unoccupied and unbid upon at auction.

When you say "unbid upon" do you mean no bids at all or no bids that at least meet a minimum price.

Where are those houses?

j.

To me I feel it is silly to use the food we could eat to run our cars. This drives up the price of everything because farmers are getting more for thier crops to make fuel than to be consumed by people. Then the price to transport it is higher and jacks up the cost even more. Yesterday I was watching a report on how algae is being looked into for biofuels. They say that with the proper light and food the algae can double itself in one day. Seems like a good idea to me! Better than planting corn and waiting 3 months to harvest it.

TomGearing, "some consensus that gasoline returns 6 times as much energy as is needed to get it to your tank."?

Does this not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Or perhaps the infrastructure merely makes it appear that the return is over unity?

Cordially Dragon

"The second law of thermodynamics is an expression of the universal law of increasing entropy, stating that the entropy of an isolated system which is not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium." Wikipedia.

Confusing an isolated system with a non-isolated system, or misplacing the boundaries for the purpose of defining the system for the entropy calculation is one of the most common mistakes made by physics students in thermodynamics classes.

We are not calculating total entropy for the universe, just observing a release, not a creation, of energy. The technical difference between throwing a lit match into a natural, self-flowing pool of bubbling combustible liquid, thereby initiating the release of millions of BTUs of energy, while expending only about 1 BTU to strike the match, is not very different from the explanation of the manufacture of the gasoline to go into yout tank. The spark from the spark plug ignites the gas in the cylinder, releasing millions of BTUs of energy there, too. The energy that is released in the car motor's cylinder does not get "put into" the gas by the oil company, it was put there 125 million years ago by mother nature. We use a little energy to move it from where Mother Nature left it for us, to where we want to use it, and we cook it to seperate different parts for different engines. None of this puts energy "into" the oil or gas, it just moves it to where we want it and how we want it. The energy we get when we burn it is the energy Mother Nature put into it 125 million years ago, and she really packed it in. There is no intrinsic connection between the energy Mom put into a cubic foot of oil when she made it, and the amount we expend moving and shaping it.

Tom, Obviously I should have put a bit more sarcasm into my post.

But the total energy usage to deliver that gallon (or liter) of fuel is considerably more than striking a match. Discovery, pumping, refining, transportation, storage, additives, etc. I trust I need not elaborate any further.

Cordially Dragon

P.S. There is every connection between the primordial creation of the hydrocarbon pool and the energy needed to deliver it to the pump. That energy had to come from somewhere. It came from earlier discoveries of the oil.

Missed the divide between serious and sarcasm. "Discovery, pumping, refining, transportation, storage, additives, etc" On average, all those energies add up to less than 1/6th the energy released in your car engine when the spark plug ignites the gas. Depending on how easy it was to find, pump and refine, and how close to the source, those energies may add up to only 4% of the released energy. (1/25th)

"That energy had to come from somewhere. It came from earlier discoveries of the oil." Check this again for the obvious time paradox: where did the energy come from for the FIRST drilling and refinement of oil? In this century, while most does, it could come from hydeo power, from solar power, or from any other source, including hay-power, as it did originally. If you check your history of oil, you will also find that for many decades, before Henry Ford, etc, gasoline was classified as toxic waste and wasy 100% destroyed by burning it at the refinery. They pumped it out a waste pipe and lit it up on the spot. Kerosene, that was the money maker. Then fuel oil. Only much later did an oil company actually get anyone to pay for gasoline.

"There is every connection between the primordial creation of the hydrocarbon pool and the energy needed to deliver it to the pump."

After a good night's sleep, I realized that we have a communication problem.

It is the word "need", in all its forms.

"the energy needed to deliver it to the pump." In science, this is a quantity, often expressed in BTUs or Kcals. In science, the words "energy needed" could not be replaced by the phrase "provided by in most situations". The various choices people make on selecting energy sources do not change the amount of energy required to carry out a physical or chemical change. The laws of physics do not change, just because people prefer one fuel over another.

People who debate the economics of the choices will bring in the added complexity, but this post seemed to be about the laws of physics, as relates to amounts of energy. If we can agree on what the words "energy needed" mean, I think we will be able to understand each other better. This is probably necessary in a universal sense, since if the words mean different things to different participants, communication becomes impossible, in general.

Point taken TomGearing, I do believe that our disagreement is a communications problem.

Cordially Dragon

It's getting to the stage where the kilowatt-hour can be used as a unit of currency...