# Presentation: 376154

## EMERGY & ENERGY SYSTEMS

**Session 10 **
**Short Course for ECO Interns, EPA and Partners**

**Notes:**
In the last session, we discussed issues of scale – landscape, process, and time – and how scale effects recommendations based on emergy values.

## Emergy Applications

- Emergy as a decision tool
- State and Regional Evaluations

**Notes:**
In this last session, we are going to focus on case studies that present different kinds of regional evaluations and on some remaining details about collecting and using data to complete your own state evaluations.  

## Emergy as Decision Tool

- Evaluating alternative plans
- Evaluating damages
- Case studies

**Notes:**
In the first part of this session we will be reviewing studies you may not actually ever attempt.  However, if the opportunity arises to do a sub-system evaluation, alternatives and damages are key elements.  As you complete the historical narrative and the environmental issue discussion for your state(s), keep these kinds of evaluations in mind.  These narratives provide the insights into what sub-systems evaluations need to be done.

## Evaluating Alternatives

**Evaluating Alternatives**

- Original use
- to be
- diverted

- New use

- Potential

- Imports

- Env.
- Resources

- In

- Io

- Io

- Fo

- Fn

- IoxIr

- Contributionold = Io + Fo
- Contributionnew = In + Fn
- Potential = Io + IoxIr

**Notes:**
This diagram may not look familiar to you, but a similar diagram was used to evaluate the net emergy benefit from the high gas mileage car rebates in the previous session.  Within the main boundary box, two alternative uses for an area are compared – the existing use and the proposed development or change.  This highly aggregated view illustrates that the final comparison considers the total of free environmental resources and any purchased goods and services brought into the area related to each alternative.  In current history with the availability of cheap fuels, natural systems have been successfully replaced by more developed systems.  This is consistent with the maximum power principle in that the system that is able to pull in more energy and maximize empower will prevail.  This is also only true in conditions with easily available high quality energy inputs.  
The smaller boundary box to the left of the large box illustrates another alternative that is useful in defining ranges for imports that are appropriate for the overall development of the larger region. Matching the environmental resources with inputs equal to the regional investment ratio provides a benchmark of sorts for feasible uses.  Plans to exceed this potential will be unlikely to be long lasting, while plans below the potential do not maximize empower for the region.

## Evaluating Alternatives

- Tables
- Evaluate all environmental resources and services that will no longer be adding to local or regional productivity
- Attempt to evaluate societal disruption
- Keep the original system data separate from the proposed alternative

**Notes:**
The Thai dam study (Brown and McClanahan) posted on this site provides good examples of emergy tables to accompany this evaluations of alternatives.  They key is to be as complete as possible in including all current services and resources that will no longer be available once a different use is in place.  This includes social issues such as displacement.
Documenting environmental damages is another important component of alternative evaluations.  These are sometimes used as negative values to illustrate the reduction of benefit from a new development, but they are also an environmental service that will no longer be available in the current use.  A detailed discussion of an example scenario was provided in the last session (treatment of fertilizer by-products).

## Case Studies

- Ecuadorian shrimp – used net benefit analysis to determine policy
- Thai dams – used alternative evaluation to determine value of hydroelectricity

**Notes:**
Take a few minutes to review the excerpts provided as PDF files related to these two important emergy studies. Parts of these case studies are available on this website – Ecuador Shrimp Mariculture (Odum and Arding) and Thai Dams (Brown and McClanahan).  If possible print the Ecuador study for use in the next slide.  We will be referring to the tables.

## Shrimp Mariculture 

- Findings:
- More emergy goes to developed nations in Ecuador’s shrimp than is received in $ return
- Emergy benefit to shrimp farmers
- Emergy deficit for local economies and Ecuador
- Policy recommendations:
- Less intensive culture
- Restore mangroves
- Promote alternative development

**Notes:**
In Table 16, a list of changes noted in completing the alternative evaluation for removing mangroves to create shrimp ponds have been pulled from the larger more complete evaluation.  These emergy values have been used to complete a net benefit analysis.  As you can see from lines 11, 14 and 15, more emergy goes to developed nations in Ecuador’s shrimp than is received in $ return.  Lines 12 and 13 indicate there is an emergy benefit to the people who are actually farming the shrimp.  However, line 14 shows that Ecuador as a region will feel a loss from this conversion.
For an insight into what has transpired since the completion of this study, read Chapter 21 (Olsen 1994) in Maximum Power (Ed. Hall, C.).

## State and Regional Evaluations

- Identifying important components
- Assumptions, interpolations, extrapolations

**Notes:**
We will wrap this short course up with some discussion about potential problems in locating data, and some ways to solve them.  We have presented many examples of data sources and conversion calculations in these units, and many more are available in the Folios and case studies provided.  It is inevitable, however, that there will be important flows into or out of a state that cannot be found on the internet, or unusual circumstances in the determination of renewables that will require a unique calculation.  I cannot repeat this often enough – any assumptions you make or any logic you use to interpolate or extrapolate need to be clearly stated in the notes following every table.

## Renewable Components

- Renewables: use long term averages
- Dominant ecosystems: divide region into different areas based on differences in rain or temperature or slope
- Rivers:
- input minus output
- No output if draining into estuary
- Use half if boundary

**Notes:**
Renewables, as already mentioned, should be evaluated using long term averages.  Because most states cover very different kinds of ecoregions, you will probably have to complete more than one calculation for each input.  For example, a state that has both mountains and desert plains or coastal areas will receive very different amounts of rainfall and wind in each of these areas.  Further, the geopotential differential will be very different between the mountains and the flat areas.  Consequently, you will need to find data sources that divide the state into appropriate regions, determine the energy resources at work and multiply by the area or elevation of the given region.
This is also true for evaporation and transpiration.  Some ecosystems have very different evapotranspiration rates.  You do not need to divide the state into as many land cover classifications as land use planners or botanists, but try to gain some understanding about how the different major systems work within your state.  For example, most forested areas transpire about the same amount, grasslands and agricultural areas are somewhat similar but with wider variations, and lakes or reservoirs are subject to a lot of evaporaion wherever the water is not shaded.  At a minimum try to determine the areas of forest, range/agriculture, wetlands, and lakes. Then use the data from the NASA site to determine overall evapotranspiration.
Rivers have a lot of details to consider.  If they form a boundary, divide the flow in half.  Count only the difference between input and output.  IF the river ends in an estuary, input is the amount you use since the outflow benefits the state through use in the estuary.  If the estuary is shared with other states, you will need to determine the share of shoreline for your state and count that much of the outflow.  If the river starts within the state but ends up outside of the state, this is a loss to the state and is listed under exports.  IF the river begins and ends within the state and the flow is significant, we sometimes list it under important interior flows, but since this represents work already done by rain and earth formations, we do not use it in the final ratios, only as a lead-in to a sub-system evaluation (we will talk about this more in a few slides).

## Emergy and Spatial Measurements

- Geopotential
- Use topo map to divide into sections with similar elevation ranges
- Shorelength
- If you know ArcView, use it to accurately measure area of wave or tide influence (not always the same)
- Evapotranspiration
- Find an ArcView map and I will help you determine areas of key ecosystems

**Notes:**
As mentioned on the previous slide, many of the renewable components will require some kind of spatial measurement of extent of influence.  If maps of regions are not provided by the state departments of natural resources, use USGS topographical maps.  Using the scale for each map, you can roughly determine the areas of different geographical sub-regions by laying graph paper with small squares over the map, counting the squares and converting to units of measure for each map.  Otherwise, look for an ArcView or ArcInfo version of the map (shapefiles or e00) and ask a GIS person to help you determine the areas.
For tides and waves, do not forget to include the continental shelf extent.  Also, waves only hit the shores directly facing the body of water.  Tides on the other hand not only affect this shoreline but also extend up into bays and rivers.  The USGS tracks the tidal extent into rivers; use this point to determine the total shoreline to use in the tidal influence calculation.

## Identifying Important Components

- Economic picture
- Exports and Imports
- Key industries
- Foreign investments
- Government subsidies

**Notes:**
The government has compiled a thorough listing of exports from each state that they update every 4 years. In addition, surveys of domestic transport are conducted every five years that contain very specific tonnage data for each state – The Commodity Flow Survey (CFS).  An extensive list of government data sources is provided in the EPA report: Environmental Accounting Using Emergy: Evaluation of the State of West Virginia, EPA-600-R-02-001 (Campbell et al. 2005).  This report also provides one method for evaluating imports and exports using the CFS.
Most of these government sources divide industry by a standardized code (SCIC), and while we can use this data for the most part as is for material and energy calculations, we may need more specific information to insure we are using an appropriate unit emergy ratio.  By seeking data for the key industries in each state, we get a better picture of the actual commodities produced, and can sometimes back out other information as well.
Agricultural subsidies and disaster payments are well documented, but you may have to be a little more creative in locating amounts of foreign investments, although paperwork on these investments is required by the US government.

## Identifying Important Components

- Environmental issues
- Usually done as a subsystem evaluation
- Can be predicted from industries and commodities produced
- Keep track of these as you find them (make copies of articles, etc.)

**Notes:**
We will not be including a thorough investigation of important interior flows or potential problems in the initial state evaluation.  However, as you complete an historical narrative and industry searches, it is helpful to keep a running list of items you uncover along with sources so that in the future you don’t need to reinvest the search time.

## Social and cultural data
US census
Social and cultural issues
Often comes out of historical background
Sometimes related to environmental issues

- US census
- Social and cultural issues
- Often comes out of historical background
- Sometimes related to environmental issues

**Identifying Important Components**

**Notes:**
Data used to determine information storages within a state come from the US Census, along with total populations and incomes.  List this information at the top of the first spreadsheet.  This data is necessary for several emergy ratios such as per capita emergy use.

## Complete the EMERGY evaluation table, identify quantities on the systems diagram, calculate emergy indices, and discuss interpretations of results.

Background: This is a large-scale river development project where a river will be channelized and several locks built to facilitate barge transportation.  The original system was a rural agricultural system with some small amount of fishing and tourism.  Once the lock and dam project is completed, the river will no longer flow through or flood adjacent floodplains, and sediments and nutrients carried by the river will no longer be deposited within the river’s floodplain, but will be carried downstream and out to sea.  However, adjacent wetlands will become improved pasture, increasing flows of purchased emergy, the lock and dam system will attract additional investment and increase transportation efficiency, and finally, construction, maintenance and operation of the lock and dam system will increase employment.  Using the following values, evaluate the development proposal.

The original system (the natural system) had a total environmental input of 2 E11 J/yr and purchased inputs as follows:
Goods = 4 E9 J/yr
Services = 3 E4 dollars/yr
The new system which has new economic uses has a lower environmental input of 1 E11 J/yr as a result of the lost wetland production, sediments and nutrients.  The purchased inputs to the new system are as follows:
Goods = 1 E10 J/yr
Services = 2 E5 dollars/yr
Given the following data:
		Transformity for environmental inputs        =  1 E5 sej/J
		Transformity for goods		   =  1 E7 sej/J
		Emergy to dollar ratio, 1985	   =  2 E12 sej/$
		Regional Investment Ratio		   =   7/1

- Background: This is a large-scale river development project where a river will be channelized and several locks built to facilitate barge transportation.  The original system was a rural agricultural system with some small amount of fishing and tourism.  Once the lock and dam project is completed, the river will no longer flow through or flood adjacent floodplains, and sediments and nutrients carried by the river will no longer be deposited within the river’s floodplain, but will be carried downstream and out to sea.  However, adjacent wetlands will become improved pasture, increasing flows of purchased emergy, the lock and dam system will attract additional investment and increase transportation efficiency, and finally, construction, maintenance and operation of the lock and dam system will increase employment.  Using the following values, evaluate the development proposal.
- The original system (the natural system) had a total environmental input of 2 E11 J/yr and purchased inputs as follows:
- Goods = 4 E9 J/yr
- Services = 3 E4 dollars/yr
- The new system which has new economic uses has a lower environmental input of 1 E11 J/yr as a result of the lost wetland production, sediments and nutrients.  The purchased inputs to the new system are as follows:
- Goods = 1 E10 J/yr
- Services = 2 E5 dollars/yr
- Given the following data:
- 		Transformity for environmental inputs        =  1 E5 sej/J
- 		Transformity for goods		   =  1 E7 sej/J
- 		Emergy to dollar ratio, 1985	   =  2 E12 sej/$
- 		Regional Investment Ratio		   =   7/1

- Practise example

**Notes:**
Try to complete this evaluation with what you have learned in these 10 sessions.  Send an email if you have questions or want the answers.

## Slide 15

**Notes:**
Complete this table and use the results to answer the questions on the next slide..

## What is the investment ratio for the old system? ___________________________
What is the investment ratio for the new system? ___________________________
Based on the regional investment ratio, which system is a better match for the area?

Who will benefit the most from the new system and why?

Who will lose the most and why?

How much investment would be appropriate for this area?

Where might this development be a better fit?

- What is the investment ratio for the new system? ___________________________
- Based on the regional investment ratio, which system is a better match for the area?
- Who will benefit the most from the new system and why?
- Who will lose the most and why?
- How much investment would be appropriate for this area?
- Where might this development be a better fit?

**Notes:**
Send an email if you have any questions.