The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 615
But, as I said it’s not that straightforward with EROEI. Here’s what I mean, let’s
say that in going through the COSTCO salad bowl scenario that you didn’t own
any knives. So you buy the fruit, take it home, realize you don’t have any knives,
jump back in the car drive back to COSTCO, buy a knife, drive back home and
cut your fruit up. Obviously, your EROEI would be way off. The cost of the extra
time, the fuel, the cost of the knife; all have to get added in. And in this scenario,
if the cost of the un-cut fruit and your time originally computed to a lower cost
than the ready-made bowl, after all the extra trouble and expense it would have
been a negative EROEI compared to buying the ready-made fruit salad bowl.
Therefore, if you have a situation where someone with an agenda wants to
prove that his thing is better than the other guy’s thing you could easily do a
real hatchet job on the other guy by adding in extra things and extra steps. You
can also complicate the outcome by purposely choosing items and materials
that are too expensive or redundant. Then, if the entire process was conducted
under the cloak of secrecy without the other guy or at least an objective observer witnessing the process and having some input as to which materials he
would use and how he would go about doing the job, you can imagine how
problematic the results of the EROEI test could be.
Robert Bryce delves into the subject of EROEI with great enthusiasm; perhaps
because his buddy Tad is involved. Bryce uses a shell game analogy, like the
one I used many pages ago. Needless to say, my use is much better, but what
else did you think I would say.
Anyway, Bryce also titles this section of the book “Corn Ethanol’s Enron Accounting.” If the first thing that came to your mind is “doublespeak,” great, you’re
catching on. As you can expect, Bryce uses lots of equations and figures that
are immaterial because as I showed earlier, the process that led to the figures
is incorrect.
However, my friend Robert Rapier makes another appearance in GUSHER OF
LIES (figuratively speaking) and Bryce uses him to help prove the EROEI point
that he is going after. I especially like the part when Bryce calls Rapier a “very
clever engineer…who writes one of the best blogs on energy and the energy
business.” I concur. You may want to go back to the first page of this chapter to
remind yourself of what I said about Rapier and to watch, again, the video he
produced just a few months ago where he advocated the production and use of
ethanol in order to become energy independent.
The “tuchas afen tish” (remember that means Bottom Line), is that the EROEI
studies conducted by Pimentel and Patzek show that the EROEI for ethanol is
