Renewable energy faces difficulties

…”Here’s the world’s dirty little secret; oil is the perfect fuel in many ways,” said Dr. Robert Kaufmann, director of Boston University’s Center for Energy and Environmental Science. “Other than environmental externalities, it’s a great fuel. It won World War II.”

Kaufmann makes clear he does not enjoy sounding like an oil advocate. But as a scientist, he admits that no renewable technology can currently compete with fossil fuels.

“I don’t like it, but I understand why it’s so difficult to displace,” Kaufmann said. “With oil, you have a liquid, so you can pour it to fill a tank. You have high energy density, so you can use it to fly. And you have a high rate of energy return on your investment.”

This last statistic, abbreviated EROI or EROEI, is the important one. Some sources of energy, like oil, have been easily assessable; think of the mid-20th century images of wells shooting up geysers of oil. Few oil fields in America today are so fecund but the fact remains that it costs less money to get power out of oil than anything else. That makes high-EROI sources like oil infinitely preferable to low-EROI sources like wind and solar.

“To get power from a windmill, you need to build one; to get power from the sun you need a photovoltaic cell,” Kaufmann said. “With oil, not only can you get power with just a simple internal combustion engine, but the infrastructure to deliver that power (gas lines and filling stations) is already disseminated all over the world.”

According to the advocacy group EROEI.com, oil has an EROI of 20, meaning you extract 20 times more energy from oil than you use getting oil. The highest EROI of the renewables, hydroelectric, is 11.

MetroWest Daily News