What you say is true for refined fuels (think of batteries as such also). But for prime energy sources EROEI must be greater than one to be viable on the long r

What you say is true for refined fuels (think of batteries as such also). But for prime energy sources EROEI must be greater than one to be viable on the long run. If coal mining had an EROEI under 1 no industrial revolution would have happened, because the manual labour for extracting the energy source would have been better spent at other tasks. Now that we have some energy sources with very high EROEI in the energy mix we use we can think about some sources as you say, for some very specific tasks.