While various energy-producing technologies have been analyzed to assess the amount of energy returned per unit of energy invested, this type of comprehensive and comparative approach has rarely been applied to other potentially limiting inputs such as water, land, and time. We assess the connection between water and energy production and conduct a comparative analysis for estimating the energy return on water invested (EROWI) for several renewable and non-renewable energy technologies using various Life Cycle Analyses. Our results suggest that the most water-efficient, fossil-based technologies have an EROWI one to two orders of magnitude greater than the most water-efficient biomass technologies, implying that the development of biomass energy technologies in scale sufficient to be a significant source of energy may produce or exacerbate water shortages around the globe and be limited by the availability of fresh water.
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1 February 2010
Burning Water: A Comparative Analysis of the Energy Return on Water Invested
Kenneth Mulder,
Nathan Hagens,
Brendan Fisher
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AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment
Vol. 39 • No. 1
February 2010
Vol. 39 • No. 1
February 2010
Biofuels
energy crops
Energy production
EROEI
ethanol
Water