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Energy Returned On Energy Invested is the single most important concept to understanding energy, alternative energy, and peak oil.”
~ Charlie Stephens

By Catherine Austin Fitts

Thanks to a highly expensive effort to maintain secrecy and generate complexity and obfuscation, most of us generally have a limited understanding of the all-important topic of energy. This week, I am delighted to welcome independent energy consultant and systems engineer Charlie Stephens to the Solari Report for a two-part interview to enlighten us on energy in the 21st century.

After spending over two decades in the Coast Guard and Navy (retiring as a Navy commander) and another 17 years as a lead policy analyst at the Oregon Department of Energy, Charlie is just the person to lead us through the thicket of complexities that surrounds energy topics. His expertise extends to energy policy, energy efficiency, renewable energy, transportation systems and land use, economic and community development, macroeconomics, international trade, foreign policy and more.

In both Charlie’s and my estimation, a discussion of energy needs to start with the recognition that it is the central banking-warfare and industrial agriculture models and the energy-intensive control grid—and not weaponized environmental issues and “climate change” scams such as those related to carbon and nitrogen—that are the leading causes of environmental harm on the planet today. A second critical point is that for energy policy to be rational, it must take into account the concept of “energy return on investment” (EROI): a ratio that describes the amount of “energy produced in relation to the energy used to create it.”

Join us for Part I as we consider the availability of and EROI for sources of energy such as oil and gas, coal, ethanol, nuclear, hydro and geothermal, wind, and solar—as well as important unanswered questions about breakthrough energy.

Money & Markets:

This is the last week of the month, so there is no Money & Markets. The next Money & Markets will publish on September 7. Post questions at the Money & Markets commentary here.


58 Comments

  1. Has everyone seen this retired Firefighter talking about Maui all the rest of the horrific fires America has had in the last decade or so?
    https://rumble.com/v3dgiiq-firefighter-whistleblower-maui-attack-not-a-wildfire-insurance-adjuster-spe.html
    I don’t know who he is, but he seems knowledgeable. He has a tiktok but I don’t know how to use that, so I found the same video on the Tim Truth Rumble site. The firefighter’s tiktok is listed under the video.
    AND
    Have you seen what the EPA is going to be spraying on the Maui burnt homes/ash piles? It is a nightmare. The spray called a “soil tackifier” (uh, sounds important. NOT) It was going to be dyed pink but after the backlash they are going to spray the crap without the pink dye.

    I can’t think of anything more toxic than what the EPA is going to use on these homes! The spokes person for the EPA in the video says he is doing it to stop the ash that might be toxic from going in the ocean, but the stuff they are spraying on the ash has a warning on the label to not use near rivers, lakes and other bodies of water!!!! Ah!

    Oh and to top it off the EPA guy was there in Northern California on video“cleaning up” fire victim’s homes and belongings…to “keep everyone safe”, there might be something dangerous or toxic in the rubble.
    Complete nightmare. I can’t stop saying that.

    Video about pink goo and the EPA:
    https://rumble.com/v3db1fg-sprayed-with-pink-goo-epa-to-nonconsensually-coat-victims-off-limit-homes-w.html

    Video after the pink goo was stopped after a public backlash, but they are still going to spray the junk, just without the pink:
    https://rumble.com/v3dey7o-stealth-spraying-after-backlash-feds-will-not-be-adding-pink-dye-to-the-non.html

    Praying for all of the fire victims. Praying for us all.

    -Jen

  2. Hello Gerdt, and thanks for the good questions and observations. I’ll work my way down through your information here.

    Catherine is correct that energy self-sufficiency, to the maximum extent possible, is very desirable, as Europe has been reminded with the Nordstream attack. As a rule, agriculturally derived liquid fuels have a very low EROEI – typically less than 1.5 :1. But if you have a farm and can use farm byproducts or waste to provide energy for the farm, that makes perfect sense, as long as you count all of the inputs. But overall, in a complex society like we in the West enjoy needs an overall EROEI between 5:1 and 8:1, according to professor Charlie Hall, who published a good paper on this back in about 2013.

    As for efficiency of use, that’s very definitely important, and from a systems perspective, always to be considered. In basic terms, one has to look at what you want to do with the energy. From a physics perspective, it doesn’t make thermodynamic sense to burn a fossil fuel at 1,900 degrees C to heat water to 55C or heat air to 20C. The thermal waste is quite large. That’s why natural gas furnaces and boilers are less efficient overall, including power plant losses, grid line losses – all in – than using a good 21st century heat pump system. Natural gas heating systems – the whole system, pumps, fans, controls, cycling losses, piping losses, etc. – are somewhere between 60 and 80 percent, typically. A typical heat pump is about 300 percent. I do a lot of that kind of work in commercial buildings these days – the savings by converting are typically 60-75 percent.

    Turning to transportation, internal combustion engines aren’t very efficient at all – about the same as a coal-fired power plant – mid-30 percent or so. Lots of waste heat goes into the air through the radiator and out the tailpipe. Big electric motors are more than 90 percent efficient. On the other hand, batteries are a disaster from a cost, toxicity, and environmental perspective. So I’m holding out for an electric vehicle that doesn’t need batteries or charging, and won’t be spying on me everywhere I go.

    But the big play here is reducing waste. Europeans waste a good bit less than Americans, in my opinion, but our economies are really designed to produce a lot of waste – that’s where the rackets’ revenue comes from. A huge energy saver is just making the things we produce in our economies last a lot longer. We throw stuff away at an incredible rate. Who fixes much of anything anymore? The amount of embedded energy and resources in the stuff we buy is huge – in this country, an internal combustion vehicle has about 30,000 km of driving energy in the car before you drive it off the lot. It’s as bad or worse for electric vehicles, because of the batteries mostly.

    I’m getting long-winded. Thanks for weighing in with the good material. Charlie

    1. Many thanks for you reply, Charlie. What I appreciate most is your hands-on experience, most obvious in your rules of thumb, like your ability to save 60-75 percent converting to electricity in a building environment.
      I have just come back from a meeting with a university friend who now works at Arcadis, a Dutch multinational engineering firm. We are going to try to get more systemic, engineering knowledge into our K-12 school (and who knows, perhaps adult-learning too), so people will have the necessary knowledge and language to have an informed systemic conversation with each other. This is where I believe the systems change needs to come from.
      Just for your interest, I once developed a Systems-course for strategy consultants. One of the team of three was an ex-PhD of John Sterman, that other icon of System modelling.
      Looking forward to next week part 2 🙂

  3. have a question related to the EROEI-discussion. You seemed to be getting into it when Catherine suggested you might want to make ethanol to be independent. That would obviously NOT be the case if you first had to buy the same amount of energy you are going to produce. So there I understand it is only EROEI that we need to take into consideration.

    But, energy is as much about production as it is having it in the right format at the right time. So, in all places where there is no oil, gas or coal, you need to import. And then get it in the right format. And then it is all about efficieny (and safety) of transport and transformation (into heat or motion usually). Do you consider this part of the energy question too? It seems that here oil and gas are far superior to electricity due to its energy density as a carrier and the relative high efficiency of combustion engines (although NOx is obviously an environmental issue in urban environments). Would be interested to hear why you are enthusiastic about electrifying everything.

    Thanks for the enlightening first part of this interview :-).

  4. Dialogue today with Charlie. – read from bottom

    On 30/08/2023 15:25, Charles Stephens wrote:

    Well I’m sure glad these Montana folks are doing what they’re doing with their cattle ranching. We need the whole cattle ranching industry to follow their lead. If the industry actually did that I might even start eating beef again. As it is now, I’d rather not take the chance of being poisoned by my food while the landscape is poisoned at the CAFO facilities and the Brazilian Amazon is destroyed to grow material that cows shouldn’t eat.

    As for turning CO2 into jet fuel, I haven’t researched that at all, but I suspect the EROEI of that process will be pretty low. One has to separate the carbon from the oxygen (which takes energy), and then you need hydrogen, to build the long-chain hydrocarbon molecules that are the basis of any hydrocarbon fuel. That hydrogen process is a significant part of the energy input at refineries that produce jet fuel in the first place, and that uses a significant fraction of our natural gas production, which in itself has a rapidly declining EROEI (fracked natural gas has a much lower EROEI than conventional natural production, and is a larger and larger fraction of our total natural gas production each year, in recent years).

    So there’s nothing sustainable about jet fuel from CO2 – it just lowers the EROEI of jet fuel even further than it is already.

    I’ll add that CO2 is hardly the only climate-related problem in the atmosphere. Far from it. A problem just as large, which we didn’t cover in our conversation, is refrigerants – the stuff that runs air conditioners and heat pumps. CO2 has a Global Warming Potential (GWP) of 1, and everything else we look at is worse. Refrigerants are a LOT worse. Each molecule of R-410a – the most common refrigerant in the last 20 years – has a 20-year GWP more than 4,000 times worse than CO2. Other refrigerants are even worse, at 6,000 to 10,000 times worse. Back around 2013 I looked at the data on how much of the refrigerants sold have been re-captured (as part of servicing or retiring air conditioners, heat pumps, and refrigerators and freezers) and the picture isn’t good. At that time, we had re-captured 3 percent of what had been sold, and it should have been something more than 20 percent. The rest of what wasn’t captured is in the atmosphere. As we know, the demand and use of air conditioning worldwide has been growing by leaps and bounds, so this problem (that no one wants to talk about) is getting worse every year.

    The only process that I’ve encountered that seems to make some sense in delivering a liquid transportation fuel is one used at a small refinery in Salt Lake City that turns all plastic waste except for PVC (which because of its chlorine content is toxic at every stage of its existence – and still banned in the EU, I believe, for that reason) into diesel fuel. The energy input for that small scale refining process is much lower because the plastic already consists of long-chain hydrocarbons (so doesn’t need the hydrogen as an external input), and that process solves another huge problem created by the massive amounts of plastic waste generated by our once-through economy. Plastics is another entire conversation, though, so I won’t get too far into that right now. The most common feedstock for plastics (as well as pharmaceuticals) is natural gas liquids – longer-chain hydrocarbons that come up with the CH4 (methane) that is the desired product. Every hydrocarbon molecule that is larger than ethane (C2H6) is a liquid at ambient temperatures (like propane, C3H8).

    I hope that’s a bit enlightening. One always has to question these bizarre projects that are brought forth as “green”, because the vast majority of the time, they only exist because of the massive corporate welfare provided to the developers (as in the case of ethanol), even though they make little or no sense on the basis of any other criteria, such as EROEI, which is far more critical. Charlie

    On Aug 29, 2023, at 10:10 PM, Catherine Austin Fitts <catherine@solari.com> wrote:

    Another energy topic I keep hearing about is sequestered carbon turned into jet fuel.40’s) lin Montana watching a huge portion of small farms giving in, selling to Brazil and moving to the city.  Your Dutch farmer interview sounded similar to the things they talk about! 

    Lately, they have been hearing about the “new energy” businesses cropping up in their state using “sequestered Carbon” and turning it into airline or a green jet fuel. I think I sent information on the carbon to jet fuel company in South Dakota earlier this month in an interview on The New American (see video below). They are horrified at what carbon containers will do to their land and what kind of off-gassing, toxic mess creating this “green fuel” will do to their state. I was wondering if either of you two hear about this…

    The interview link below talks about eminent domain, the CO2 capture pipeline in South Dakota nightmare and how Gov Kristi Noem is on the wrong side of this issue… So and so directly involved with A1 solutions, a company that is taking CO2 and turning it into fuel (jet fuel) in South Dakota. 

    https://rumble.com/v321qke-trent-loos-on-the-loos-in-iowa-defending-landowners-against-eminent-domain.html

    Here is the Montana based company: https://montanarenewables.com/products/sustainable-aviation-fuel/

    ls they can toss them because of the feedstock they produce out of toxic seed oils and the like.

    There was an article about a carbon removal company in Montana on euronews as well, where they titled the facility “Project Bison”. A horrific name if you think back to what the railroad companies did to the Bison who were in the way of the train tracks…ugh. 

    https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/09/15/carbon-capture-wyomings-new-plant-could-be-a-game-changer-in-the-race-to-slow-global-warmi

    1. Catherine and Charlie, I will send on this comment to the family in Montana, if they haven’t seen it here already. ; )
      I didn’t know that about air conditioners, I knew they were toxic but I thought the recapture was much, much higher: 3% vs 20%? Awful. Of course with the heat we have here in Southern California, without air conditioners, it gets very dangerous for the homebound who can’t leave to get to a “cooling center”.
      I never had central air growing up until we moved into a new home in the 1980’s. I also remember our older homes “breathing” better than they do now. Heat would rise and be able to leave, moisture could evaporate etc… nowadays the newer “green” house paints and coatings, “greener” insulation- not the blown in shredded denim looking stuff we had during the 1970’s. It seems everything has been made to seal in water, heat, toxins. Add in the electromagnetic waves and mold can grow fast and furious. What a toxic soup.
      Thank you for the informative interview and comments.
      Have a wonderful weekend,
      Jen

  5. Catherine you are incredible. Great interview. Solari enlightens its subscribers and allows us to use critical thinking. I thank you & pray for you each day. GOD BLESS YOU!

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