Green Mountain College, One Brennan Circle, Poultney, VT 05764, USA.
Ambio. 2010 Feb;39(1):30-9. doi: 10.1007/s13280-009-0003-x.
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.
虽然已经分析了各种能源生产技术,以评估每单位投入能源所产生的能源量,但这种全面和比较的方法很少应用于其他潜在的限制投入,如水、土地和时间。我们评估了水和能源生产之间的联系,并对几种可再生和不可再生能源技术进行了比较分析,以评估投入水的能源回报(EROWI)。我们的结果表明,最节水的化石燃料技术的 EROWI 比最节水的生物质技术高出一到两个数量级,这意味着生物质能源技术的发展规模足以成为主要能源来源,可能会在全球范围内造成或加剧水资源短缺,并受到淡水资源供应的限制。