pretty good post
This is a pretty good post.
There are a few key elements missing.
With ethanol, almost everyone (including you) fails to recognize that the corn distilliation process does not produce ethanol exclusively. When corn is turned into ethanol it also produces distillers grain as a by-product. What's distillers grain used for? You can feed it to cows. What's corn used for, if not distilled into ethanol? In america, we feed it to cows.
So, in the insane "feed corn to cows" world, the alternate strategy of "feed corn to cars and cows" is almost surely less insane (i.e. a net win).
Strangely, the ethanol haters like to assume the distillers grain is thrown away, or that corn, if not turned to ethanol, is used to make corn totillas for poor people. Neither is even remotely true.
The other missed point with oil sands is that it energy input is largely natural gas, and not the oil itself. (The processes vary). The input energy could very well be nuclear power, or even wind power, for that matter. A large part of the input energy is creating steam, which can be created with all sorts of ways.
So the EROI for oil sands probably needs to be more holistic and ask where the steam energy is sourced from. If shale gas is very high EROI, or if even higher nuke EROI is used, then effective EROI of oil sands surely improves.
(Think about it - if the oil sands operation was located next to the a massive hydro dam (say dating from a depression era government boondoogle) that was kicking out huge quantities of dirt cheap electricity, the price break even point for oil sands would fall by quite a bit, and the EROI would be silly without treating the hydro electricity as borderline free. This extreme thought experiment demonstrates why we need to back up a step and ask what the EROI is of the energy source that is creating the steam),
