I don’t know much about thermodynamic efficiency, but I have heard of EROEI — energy returned on energy invested. If a power company has good EROEI, that is probably where the debate should start. However, some necessary companies are going to lose energy and that is okay. We accumulate energy sources so that we can use energy as physical work.

If at site X the managers must spend three barrels of refined oil to pump enough crude to make just one barrel of refined oil, then site X is not very promising. If, however, there is some weird source of energy that is normally not very good — e.g. intermittent solar power — and that can pump out the crude — then site X might be able to limp along for a few more years.

A different problem is how to claw back some useful energy from processes that are not primarily centered on energy production. For example, humans need food and humans must dispose of the farm waste inevitably resulting from food production. Sometimes that farm waste is a profitable energy source, and sometimes it is not. Biofuels are a good idea, IMHO, because farm companies have to spend money to handle garbage somehow.

Example from 2016:

Since 2011, the gas from the organic farm’s £750,000 anaerobic co-digester (AD) has generated more than 4.5m kWh of electricity and heat for the farmhouse, an on-site engineering works and for 80-100 homes.

“But I am not turning the farm into a rural power station. My job is to grow food,” says Tomlinson, who co-founded one of Britain’s largest organic milk co-operatives.

Is the EROEI good for generating electricity from cow dung? Maybe, maybe not. But as long as we eat cow meat, we are going to have to process the cow dung somehow, and we might as well process it in a way that claws back some useful energy.

Getting back on topic:

“To overcome the lignin hurdle, Cai invented CELF, which stands for co-solvent enhanced lignocellulosic fractionation.”

I am sure CELF is carbon-neutral. I am not a global climate crisis panic-monger, though, so I am not very worried or very excited about carbon-neutral technologies. I would be very interested in CELF companies if they could show good EROEI numbers.

It will be interesting to see if the elite start touting this, leaving EV owners in the lurch like everyone who swapped their incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescents, only to be told that we should be using LEDs instead.

It’s ludicrous to trust these people at this point. Same with the sudden love of nuclear power. It boils down to hatred of people and the desire to be rid of most of them.

If you ou do a Google Scholar search for “lignin” you’ll see countless papers over generations of people trying to deal with this problem (similar in fame as trying to deal with, manipulate, or find uses for chitosan). It is hard because it is the evolved solution to the arms race of decomposing organisms trying their best to break it down fast, with feasible energy expenditure, and with chemicals that are compatible with sustaining biological conditions. If nature can’t do it well enough to suit our purposes, odds are we can’t either, and if you are going to embrace chemically harsh conditions then you might as well go all the way.