Energy Return on Investment (EROI) of Brazilian Coal Production

Abstract

The rapid growth in energy demand globally sets the need for studies that evaluate the capacity of a fuel to provide an energy surplus after accounting for all the energy needed to make it available for society. The energy indicator known as energy return on investment (EROI) has been widely used for that purpose, analyzing both renewable and non-renewable fuels ability to provide useful energy. However, there are no study which estimate the EROI for Brazilian fossil fuel production. In this sense, the goal of this study is to calculate the EROI for Brazilian coal production, analyzing how much surplus energy this fuel yield after accounting the energy necessary to its extraction, processing and transportation. The results show that the EROI value highly depends on the data source, with values ranging from 30 to 57 for the Santa Catarina States’ coal production and going as high as 115 for the Rio Grande do Sul States’ coal production. LCA software SimaPro was also used as a way to estimate the EROI for Brazilian coal production due to its extensive database. Results from both methods are in agreement when considering only the extraction and processing steps, but diverge when the transportation energy costs are added. Differences in the transportation process are the probable cause for the discrepancies in the EROI value. Despite this difference, both methods show that the Brazilian coal is a net energy source.