BRAVO OREGON!

The Governor's Mansion in Salem, Oregon, has the reputation of being an environmentalist hotbed, and so we opened their 21l-page report, "Energy Study - Interim Report" somewhat gingerly. But a pessimist's surprises are always pleasant: It is a superb reference work, the most complete collection to date of figures showing how much energy is needed to produce a given amount of energy. Unlike the sparse data that can, with great difficulty, be ferreted out of the Bureau of Mines, the Oregon study considers not only the energy losses in extraction, processing, transportation, conversion and transmission, but also in exploration. Moreover, it also considers "external energy inputs", e.g., the energy that went into producing the rig that is drilling for oil. Apart from the conventional and nuclear fuels, the report also considers such energy sources as coal gasification, Iiquefied gas from the North Slope, geothermal heat, and solar systems. Dollar investments are also estimated in each case. The entire report towers high above anything that has come out of Washington, from the FEA to the Ford Foundation's band of jokers.

There have recently been press reports, quoting unidentified sources in the Bureau of Mines, to the effect that oil shale uses as much energy in mining and processing as it makes available, and that therefore it is not worth mining. We were unable to get any figures on the point, and that is why we did not include oil shale in last month's survey. In any case, the Oregon report makes hash out of these environmental canards. From the Oregon figures we find an energy gain of 7.8 from deposit to place of burning, resulting in an overall energy gain for power generation (including conversion and transmission losses) of 2.4, which is of the same order as the energy of conventional oil (2.7). The primary resource loss in mining oil shale is not yet known, and is probably quite small. But even if it were as high as 50%, the resulting system efficiency for an oil shale-electric system would be 13.5%, compared to 13% for offshore oil and 10% for onshore oil.

Canard fricasse, a gourmet would call it.