It Takes Energy to Make Energy: The Net's the Thing
Stansbury, Edward Flattau and Jeff
It Takes Energy to Produce Energy: The Net's the Thing by Edward Flattau and Jeff Stansbury Suppose you’ve found a wondrous goose that lays seven golden eggs a week. Does this mean you will...
...But what is significant is that the energy efficiency of U. S. agriculture has been steadily declining...
...implacable logic to their decisions...
...In the past, when oil returned a high net energy yield, it handsomely subsidized ‘all our other fuel and power sources...
...and is worth less...
...Big Muskie,” a giant coal extractor now tearing up Muskingum County, Ohio, gulps enough power each day for 27,000 all-electric homes...
...The infamous U. S.-Soviet wheat deal two years ago provides a vivid example of the fickle relationship between dollars and net energy...
...Furthermore, each of these steps, like the extraction process itself, consumes considerable energy...
...Agriculture Department officials have stated that, because of the energy squeeze, we will face a nitrogen fertilizer shortfall of about one million tons this spring...
...This exchange was a financial windfall for a few grain exporting firms, but an energy disaster for Americans...
...Not the various rigged shortages and price machinations you’ve been reading about, but the real thing: our net energy crisis...
...A fuel can remain artificially underpriced for months, even years, after its net yield drops...
...Simon’s 800-year bonanza has shrunk to a few decades...
...The sober conclusion seems to be that our nuclear energy program would collapse without its big energy subsidy from oil...
...It is in our cards because the high net-yielding energy sources we need to survive, with the doubtful exception of nuclear fusion, cannot match the total daily output we have heretofore enjoyed from the fossil fuels...
...Corporations would go bankrupt if they did not understand the distinction between gross income and net profit, but our thinking about energy has somehow not yet reached this level of sophistication...
...Odum...
...The truth is often stated backwards by economists,” says Dr...
...President Nixon, a flock of oil company executives, and most influential economists have yet to discover net energy let alone apply its Edward Flattau and Jeff Stansbury coauthor an environmental column syndicated by The Los Angeles Times syndicate...
...Of course you can’t eat gasoline, so the equation is somewhat invalid...
...What natural energy harvests will be sacrificed by these alternatives...
...Extracting and refining the 30 per cent of the oil may consume so much energy that the net energy yield is quite low...
...In a recent book, The Energy Crisis, Lawrence E. Rocks and Richard Runyon predict that the net energy yield from 99 per cent of our Rocky Mountain oil shale will be zero...
...The rest disappears through physical losses in processing and transportation, heat losses during conversion to electricity, and electrical leakage from transmission lines...
...And (assuming the necessary copper can be scavenged) will windmills be practical...
...That single paragraph makes more sense about our energy predicament than volumes of solemn declarations from the Senate Interior Committee, the Federal Energy Office, and the oil companies...
...manufacturing the concrete for these plants...
...Ecologists are familiar with both the growth state and the steady state...
...The energy costs of mining coal and converting it to electric power must then be subtracted from the 30 per cent left after Ieakage and physical disappearance...
...Odum...
...To bring one 1,200-calorie loaf of cracked wheat bread to a suburban table, how many thousands of calories must we spend on fertilizer, pesticides, cultivation, harvesting, farm overhead, milling, baking, distribution, sales, and-no t leas t-that luxurious trip to the...
...Wilson Clark, a Washington, D. C. energy specialist, claims that it cost us 10 units of energy to ship grain worth one unit of energy to the Russians...
...Flunking the Net Energy Test This means, among other things, that each of our remaining fuels must henceforth meet the test of its own intrinsic net energy ratio...
...Unfortunately, common sense suggests that the net yield from our remaining coal deposits will be low...
...Seven months ago the President’s Council on Environmental Quality issued a booklet on electric power...
...In a recent interview with The Washington Post, William Simon declared: “Today we’ve got an 800-year supply of coal in this country where we can get from 25 to 35 per cent of our needs...
...Oil built hydroelectric dams...
...This inflationary bind could exist in a rising or a falling economy, provided that the actual money supply did not substantially d win de...
...We must also calculate the potential energy we lose when we decide to use land for strip-mining...
...By wasting it and forcing us to replace it with manufactured nitrogen, sanitary engineers make us burn the equivalent of an extra 2.2 billion gallons of fuel oil each year...
...The “facts” of the last five years boil down to a lickety-split inflation that has respected neither boom nor bust...
...But today, our free ride on oil is coming to a halt...
...Without sounding pompous, it seems quite plausible that our shrinking net energies provide part of the theory that resolves this seeming paradox...
...finding, mining, refining, and transporting the metals that go into nuclear power plants...
...Money then buys less real work...
...California State University professor Michael Perelman has calculated that the energy value of the food Americans consume roughly equals the energy burned by tractors-just one fraction of our farm machinery...
...What really counts is how much energy we must expend to get the obtainable energy...
...Losing Energy with Atomic Power Then there’s nuclear power, which ‘the Nixon Administration is betting will eliminate our energy problems forever by the end of the century...
...Our system of man and nature will soon be shifting from rapid growth to steady state non-growth as the criterion of economic survival,” says Dr...
...This was not a fluke...
...How will the net yield of western strip-mined coal compare with the midwestern deep-mined coal...
...It puts the spotlight on the steady decline in the net energy yields of our traditional fossil fuels...
...In 1973, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) used 25.7 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity just to produce the uranium needed to fuel nuclear power stations-stations with a power output of about 50-billion kwh...
...There are between one billion and 10 billion barrels of shale oil buried in the West, according to official estimates...
...Balancing Our Energy Accounts Clearly, before the United States invests hundreds of millions and then billions of dollars in a desperate scramble for miracle fuels, we must devise a system of national energy accounts...
...George Borgstrom, a food scientist at Michigan State University, calculates that it takes the calorie equivalents of five tons of coal to make one ton of nitrogen fertilizer...
...How much of the energy from western coal must be pumped back into its production...
...Let’s look briefly at three such fuels: coal, uranium oxide, and shale oil...
...we can tap only so much of it each day...
...How heavily must we subsidize the next 25 years of nuclear fission...
...This could even drop off close to zero if the land from which the shale is extracted is to be pushed back into place and recontoured...
...So far, however, 25 years of nuclear fission power has drained off more energy than it has produced...
...If it takes 10 units of energy to bring 10 units of energy to the point of use, then there is no net energy...
...When we hear the term “fuel efficiency,” it is easy to think of extraction ratios: for example, that we only suck about 30 per cent of the oil in an oil field out of the ground, or that solar-energy devices can convert only about one per cent of the incoming light into useful energy...
...Immense amounts of water will have to be set aside to gasify, liquefy, or convert its costs into electricity...
...Does this mean you will be able to comer the gold market...
...Whether we like it or not, we’ll have to live within our means...
...In return we were promised Soviet natural gas worth two energy units...
...We need to launch this accounting revolution immediately, for the world we face tomorrow is not the world we know today...
...Unlike oil from wells, coal can be extracted only after tons of earth have been pushed aside...
...Unfortunately, no, because to keep the bird fat and fluffy-and to keep its production up-you must feed it six golden egg yolks each week...
...And the notion that shale oil will become profitable at the very moment when it can no longer count on a big initial subsidy from deep-well oil is, in net energy terms, absurd...
...supermarket...
...Why is a new steady state-presumably at a decent level of health and well-being-in our cards...
...For a typical American grain farmer, the ratio is dramatically reversed: one unit of energy harvested for five expended...
...Despite America’s moderately high per-acre crop yields (up 63 per cent in the last 20 years), American farmers use more petroleum than any other economic group, and, as a result, they consume much more energy than they produce...
...If you also include the energy costs of searching for uranium ore, mining it and transporting it...
...Nor would The New York Times and The Washington Post reporters who have been following Simon around with almost a religious zeal...
...Perelman’s statistics also show that most other countries balance this equation better than we do...
...Is oil shale still too costly to develop...
...Meanwhile, the sewage technology employed by our narrowly trained sanitary engineers has been dumping about 2.4 million tons of perfectly good nitrogen into our lakes, streams, and estuaries each year...
...In the case of strip-mined coal these tons are literally mountains-mountains which must later be bulldozed back into shape, covered with topsoil, seeded, and carefully tended for 15 or so years (that is, unless we’re willing to leave the land unreclaimed...
...Except for the London School’s Ezra Mishan and a mere handful of kindred spirits, they reject the possibility of a steady state even though man lived in something very close to one during 99 per cent of his evolution...
...In the extremely labor-intensive agriculture of China, a wet-rice farmer produces 50 units of food energy for each energy unit he expends...
...Simon has simply commandeered-and inflated- the best prevailing estimates of our gross coal reserves without making any allowance for the energy cost of extracting this coal...
...now we must literally squeeze oil from marginal ones, or import it from abroad in tankers (which themselves use fuel), or pump it long distances from offshore rigs to refineries...
...Senator Henry M. Jackson, Capitol Hill’s leading energy warrior, hasn’t heard of it either and William E. Simon, chief of the Federal Energy Office, wouldn’t recognize a net energy ratio if he tripped over one on his way to a press briefing...
...The dollar costs of new oil wells, for example, depend on tax write-offs and other accounting decisions which do not reflect net energy...
...Even ten years ago some 150 gallons of gasoline per American flowed into food production...
...It does not matter whether you start with energy in the ground (coal, gas, oil, uranium oxide, plutonium, steam), in surface waters (hydropower reservoirs, tides, waves), and the land (timber, food, manure) or in space (sunlight, wind): in order to use it, you must first expend almost as much energy just to obtain it...
...For our overseas oil, how much energy do we invest in our Mediterranean fleet, in our farflung corporate empires, and in their support structures in the Departments of State, Commerce, and Interior...
...Three months ago, Brookings Institution President and former Budget Director Kermit Gordon admitted to the American Economics Association’ “I know of no neat rneory of inflation that fits the facts of the last five years-neither aggregate demand, nor money supply, nor labor power, nor oligopoly power, nor bottlenecks, nor expectations-though I could easily be convinced that they all played a part...
...John R. Sheaffer, until recently the U. S. Army’s top environmental consultant, estimates that this nitrogen is worth $1 billion and equals nearly a third of the synthetic fertilizer sold...
...Will solar converters yield a rich net energy harvest...
...Immutable laws of net energy are leading us toward an economic steady state...
...Another problem is that the entire debate over fuels is dominated by economists, geologists, and capitalists, who have been trained to think only in terms of dollars...
...Hoffman concluded,“ The cumulative energy expenditure of the entire atomic energy program may not be recouped from nuclear fission power plants by the time the reserves of economically recoverable U-235 are used up.’’ Shale oil presents us with another statistical no-man’s land...
...Economists, however, have been schooled during, by, and for growth...
...One reason why almost nobody seems to care about net energy is the tendency of otherwise knowledgeable people to confuse net energy with mere efficiency of extraction...
...This is the only way we can reach that redoubtable state Mr...
...If you haven’t pondered net energy, the fault’s not yours alone...
...Agriculture presents an object lesson in the dynamics of net energy...
...That may be efficient in terms of man-hours, but it is wasteful of energy...
...Net energy is the energy you start with minus the energy you use up producing it-in other words, the calories you must spend to find, mine, transport, refine, convert, and deliver it...
...Reclaiming most of this sewage will greatly improve the net energy yield of our agriculture, although it is not the whole answer...
...A bookkeeping system capable of answering these and a vast number of related questions will do something for us that mere dollars cannot: it will test our economic sanity, rationalize our economic planning, and give us a long-lost sense of proportion vis a vis the natural world we inhabit...
...Our nearest, least resistant oil fields have been drained...
...for an infinite period of time...
...Net result: only one golden egg for sale...
...It Takes Energy to Produce Energy: The Net's the Thing by Edward Flattau and Jeff Stansbury Suppose you’ve found a wondrous goose that lays seven golden eggs a week...
...Since World War I1 our per-acre yields of corn have tripled, but our nitrogen energy inputs have risen 16 times...
...operating them (which includes driving to and from work...
...Oil and electricity extracted our coal...
...Joseph Browder, of Washington’s Environmental Policy Center, says, “The energy costs of stripping Northern Great Plains coal must include the direct loss of agricultural productivity in the Powder River Basin and other areas where livestock produced on native grasses would be replaced by livestock produced in a feedlot system dependent on energy-int ensive, fertilized, irrigated crops.’’ In the West, the energy problems caused by strip-mining are a little different...
...We are still expanding our rate of consumption of gross energy, but since we are feeding a higher and higher percentage back into the energyseeking process, we are decreasing aur percentage of net energy production...
...Most of them have never seen a steady state...
...This means new water sources will have to -be developed, at a high energy cost, to replace those consumed by producing coal...
...Nixon calls “energy self-sufficiency...
...they observe both in natural systems...
...When all these relevant energy costs are deducted, the net yield from strip-mining our deep coal reserves may drop to three or four per cent or less...
...Oil, coal, and gas have been a marvelous energy “capital,” a 400-million-yearold bankroll for the Western world...
...But it doesn’t cost us anything to pass up that 99 per cent of solar energy or 70 per cent of oil...
...we get nothing and we expend nothing, so this loss doesn’t really affect our calculations...
...Howard T. Odum, professor of Environmental Engineering Sciences at the University of Florida, has done some of the most provocative thinking on the importance of net energy...
...You must also add in any other energy yields that you have sacrificed in the singleminded pursuit of this one fuel...
...But the ability of marginal sources to yield goes down as the sources of subsidy become poorer...
...Oil made 20th-century America “work...
...Often they propose that marginal energy sources will become economic when the rich sources are gone...
...and storing or reprocessing the “dirty” wastes from nuclear fission, you will find the 1972 net energy yield from uranium has probably sagged to less than 10 per cent...
...It’s easy to see where the problem comes from...
...Many forms of energy are low-grade because they have to be concentrated, transported, dug from deep in the earth or pumped from far at sea,’’ Odum says...
...Three years ago, after studying the past, present, and projected yields of U. S. nuclear power plants, Dr...
...The kindest phrase we can think of to describe this statement is “whistling in the dark...
...Financially it worked out fine,” Clark says, “but in energy terms we suffered a 5 to 1 net loss...
...Well then, they advise, wait for conventional fuels to grow scarce (high-priced) and shale oil will become a profitable commodity...
...The largest portion of our energy deficit in agriculture comes from the use of nitrogen fertilizer...
...This may make oil seem more “efficient” than solar energy...
...Of all the deep or strip-mined coal that we extract, only 30 per cent reaches the final user...
...Sunlight is energy “income,” however...
...However, after all the energy requirements of shale oil have been subtracted, there may be a net yield of only a few hundred million barrels...
...As much as half of the gross electrical output of a nuclear plant would have to be recycled to supply input for fuel processing,” says E. J. Hoffman, a University of Wyoming nuclear energy specialist...
...That was five times as much energy as each of us consumed at the table-and the ratio has grown even worse in the ensuing decade...
...It contained some serious errors, but one useful fact can be found in it...
...This yarn may augur a potentially grim tale for the U.S...
...Without doubt, net energy may well be the simplest idea ever to have been ignored by so many acknowledged experts...
...Professor Odum sees it that way: “If the energy reaching society for its general work is less because so much energy must go into the energygetting process, then the real work of society per unit of money circulated is less...
...And these shortages have already raised fertilizer prices by 30 to 60 per cent over last year’s level...
...Oil grew our wheat...
...economy, for it symbolizes our net energy crisis...
...The trouble with such incantations is that they assume the dollar costs ofa given fuel will faithfully-and quicklyreflect its energy costs...
...This assumption is unwarranted...
...Right now we dig further and further, deeper and deeper, and we go for energies that are more and more dilute...
Vol. 6 • March 1974 • No. 1
