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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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“Drill, baby, drill” has become a slogan of those who want to produce more oil and gas and who scoff at alternatives to petroleum. But rarely mentioned is the expense required to get that oil and gas—and still more rarely mentioned is the energy required to access those resources.
Charles Hall, an ecologist at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, has spent most of his long career trying to get fellow researchers and the public to take a serious look at the energy required to get the energy we use. He is given credit for creating a measure known as the energy return on investment, or EROI—the ratio of energy output over energy input. (With oil, for example, the energy output would be the crude oil produced, and the energy input would be all that required to find the oil reservoir, drill the well and pump the oil out of the ground.) EROI is a crucial metric, Hall argues, because it helps us see which energy sources are high quality and which are not.
Hall and his students did pioneering work in this area, including a 1984 paper on the cover of Science. For many years, however, interest in the topic languished. But recent soaring oil prices and increasing difficulty of accessing new supplies have helped create economic hardships, leading to resurgent interest in EROI. Scientific American asked Hall to explain the basis of the EROI and how it pertains to our economy.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
You’re a self-described “nature boy” who became an ecologist. So how did you create the idea of energy return on investment (EROI)?
I had this unbelievable doctoral advisor, H. T. Odum of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He said, “Well, Charlie, I don't think anyone has thought about fish migration from a systems perspective.”
I went down to the coast of North Carolina, looking for a place where I could do this research. And I found one: in this freshwater environment, where fish weren't supposed to be migrating, they were migrating like crazy.
And you approached this migration mystery from an energy-use perspective. How did you do that?
I measured the ecosystem productivity by the free-water oxygen technique. I measured it at five different places, upstream and downstream, and found some very clear patterns. The energy available to the fish was much more concentrated as you went upstream, and I developed this theory that the fish would migrate to capitalize on the abundance of energy for the first year or two of the life, and then the young fish would migrate downstream into a more stable but less productive environment.
The study found that fish populations that migrated would return at least four calories for every calorie they invested in the process of migration by being able to exploit different ecosystems of different productivity at different stages of their life cycles.
So from studying fish migration, was it a big leap to think about people and fossil fuels?
No, probably because Howard Odum was evolving in his thought processes. He wrote a book Environment, Power and Society at about that time. An amazing thing working with Odum was, for him, there are just systems. It doesn't matter if it's a forested system or a stream system or an estuarine system, or whether people are there or not. It's just a system—and systems have many similar patterns and many similar processes of consumption and production, and they often even have similar controls on them.
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43 Comments
Add CommentWhat needs to be added is the cost of depolluting the CO2 released into the atmosphere. Fossil fuels will then seem poor competitors compared to renewables...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEROEI is why energy intensive extraction methods required for the Tar Sands and oil shale do not make sense. The Tar Sands require one unit of energy, mostly in the form of natural gas, just to extract 4 or 5 units of energy in the form of bitumen. Then you have to "upgrade" it, transport it to a refinery, distribute the refined fuel to filling stations only to pour it into a multi-ton steel behemoth that throws away AT LEAST 80% of the energy content of the fuel as waste heat...on a good day! And don't even get me started on the sprawling moonscapes or vast sludge LAKES these Tar Sands operations have caused.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCompare this to a solar panel that produces more energy than it took to make it in about a year and then goes on to keep producing at roughly the same output for 20 to 30 more years. An EROEI of 20-to-1 is a much better alternative to the destructive and wasteful Tar Sands. And the silicon and metals in the solar panel can be recycled at the end of their useful lives into even MORE efficient and productive solar panels using a fraction of the energy required to originally make them.
We have a choice to make. One path leads us to more pollution, more climate disruption, more instability and uncertainty as fossil fuels dwindle, and less prosperity dealing with all these issues. Another choice promises us energy stability, a cleaner environment and greater prosperity basically forever. It is impossible to accurately predict how much fossil fuel is actually left in the ground or how much of it we can extract given economic and EROEI issues. However, I can predict with ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY that the sun will rise in the east in the morning every day (for the next few billion years at least) and the wind will blow in places it is prone to movement. Whether we're smart enough as a species to make the right call is still up for debate, however.
With the pricing of wind and solar on financial par with natural gas and doubling in installed capacity every three years the future looks certain. At this exponential rate within a generation the entire world will be generating all power via renewable energy. Excess electricity will be used in the conversion of co2 and h20 into methane. Methane will then be used for transportation. Or so it seems if the market continues as it has for the last 12 years!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGreens need to get it together. Dire predictions of tenfold increases in storm surges and offshore turbines just don't fit together. Offshore proponents need at least to pretend to believe the doomsday warnings.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA good article and something that we all should think about.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAn excellent article, EROEI is something the Peak Oil Deniers and Burn-Baby-Burn advocates don't want to talk about. EROEI on Solar & Wind is Ok, but with them other issues dominate the equation by a large margin. And of course since Wind & Solar have a high associated demand of fossil fuels they carry they same EROEI handicap as new sources of fossil fuels.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEROEI is very important but it is not the only factor. Cost of production, reliability, scalability, practicality, longevity are also important considerations. In those Wind & Solar are dismal failures.
There is no "Greens". It's just a thoughtless label that thoughtless people assign to folks they disagree with.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCO2 is not pollution. It is plant food that is essential for life on this planet.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSorry but your facts are wrong. The EROEI is much higher for tar sands than it is for solar panels. Solar panels have a negative EROEI at this point in time and are destroyers of capital while they masquerade as a solution. If we want to find out what works and what doesn't all we need to do is let the markets work as they are supposed to by cutting all subsidies and taxes on the production of energy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article begins with a false premise when it states- “Drill, baby, drill has become a slogan of those who want to produce more oil and gas and who scoff at alternatives to petroleum”. That statement is incorrect in that many people who think it is very important to produce more energy in the US take this position for the entirely rational reason that it is economically unwise to put a nation’s economy at risk by sending a vast percentage of your nations wealth to other nations to buy energy if it can be avoided cost effectively. Being energy independent also greatly lessens the risk of damage to a nation’s economy and security by disruptions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAdditionally, the concept of EROI is already accounted for in the price of the fossil fuel that consumers purchase. If it costs more to get at a new fossil fuel resource that one can sell that resource for, then nobody will seek to extract that resource.
Now to the headline of the article- “Will fossil fuels be able to maintain economic growth.”
The answer depends on the timeline under consideration. Will fossil fuels be able to maintain economic growth for 1000 years? Probably not. Will fossil fuels be able to maintain economic growth for 100 years? Yes. It is an issue of the population, time and the discovery and exploitation of new resources. They are not unlimited, but they are also not going to run out in the immediate future.
Yes, and too much of it, like literally anything, will result in the end of all life on this planet.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne reason denialist like you have been so thoroughly discredited is because you cling with absolute devotion to the "magic of the market" meme, ignoring failures of the market in issues like negative externalities (ie pollution) and insist, with the devotion of a true believer, that simply eliminating government involvement will magically solve everything.
People seem to be pulling EROEI numbers from different sources or are not sure of the concept. There is a definition of this term along with numbers that make no sense and a sort of apology for the fact the numbers are currently so bad or just plain wrong. Here is the wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSure it can and it is. China, India are going full speed ahead. Growth in the USA is largely irrelevent on a world scale other than as temporary blips.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this'Should' growth continue is a different issue...one of value judgement. Economic growth is a social concept.
Re Alberta's oilsands, etc...if they didn't make any sense then they wouldn't be generating billions in revenue. Oil in the ground has no value...just as gold in the ground has no value. Mining often takes 98% or higher investment costs to return profit...energy is no different. Part of the cost is use of energy. what matters 'economically' is the output in dollars.
Linking environment to economics is a losing cause. Man creates cities, farms, etc. that completely destroy the ecosystem. It may be a noble link but isn't going to matter in China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, the UISA, etc. Germany isn't going to forest over Berlin or its autobahns.
I had not heard of EROI before. It seems pretty straight forward, but I don’t see how it is different than ROI in the real world. If acquiring energy costs enough less than its value to make a reasonable ROI, you invest to acquire the energy. That’s what the fish are doing. If the return isn’t there it is selected against.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPeople acquiring energy are doing exactly the same thing as the fish. I’m not sure why identifying both activities as system was a revelation, but systems they seem to be. Systems try to adapt to that which benefits the individual system. Some systems fail.
I suggest the more fundamental question is, “Are there too many people on the planet?” Many people smarter than I am have said something to the effect, “The system will sort it all out.” Other animal systems work out population levels. Ours will too.
With a sufficiently lower number of people on the planet, most points argued on this site would not matter all that much. And without lower human populations it seems unlikely all the fixes could have a noticeable impact. My guess is that population will peak at some point then trend lower over time as the system optimizes itself. The level of misery to get there that is unknown.
Thoughts anyone?
Gen III nukes have an EROI of 50 and Gen IV close to 1000.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWind is 30 and solar PV 6 but are both negative with gas backup or storage.
http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/03/08/tcase8/
If you want civilization to continue we need to go 100% nuke now.
A worldwide investment in 10000 new nuclear reactors would be paid for by and would end fossil fuel use, eliminate most air pollution saving millions of lives, end the global warming/ peak oil problem with a 100% elimination of GHG's within a ten year time frame, is a great investment making the economy more efficient, a wonderful job producing economy boost, requires only a small part of our industrial capacity, and pays for itself in less than three years.
With mass production nuclear power costs drop to under $1B Gw much less expensive than coal or natural gas generation and 10% the cost of the cheapest renewable. Asian reactor builds now around $1.5 B Gw are trending to the $1B level.
Nuclear fuel supply and waste issues are resolved with already operating and well understood fast reactors.
The US with an $2500B nominal investment in nuclear power paid for by quickly weaning itself off its $1000B annual fossil fuel bill could do the same. Unfortunately it is crippled by inefficient private power companies, a biased Nuclear Rejection Commission and corrupt and litigious political and legal systems, quadrupling nuclear costs and time frames.
Maybe somebody who speaks common sense could persuade the maybe one of two of Obama's handlers that can think, of the value of a national energy policy involving the DMSR nuke (thorium) reactor - a great efficient penny a kwh synfuel factory just like that chinese HTGR. With a paltry $two billion in investment diverted from the stupid DOE's $10B's in wacky way out there never never land ethanol and carbon capture nonsense, within 5 years these would be a major energy and industrial benefit.
Google "David LeBlanc - Molten Salt Reactor Designs, Options & Outlook"
The biggest problem is a nuclear conversion will put Big Oil out of business in less than ten years and they buy a lot of politicians with their campaign donations.
We need to calling up our politicians and demanding to know the reason for their inaction. Why are they wasting precious time and treasure on silly not so "renewable" projects and even dumber tax schemes like cap n'trade and green taxes.
Are their campaign donations so precious they are choosing to end civilization rather than get off Big Oil's gravy train.
Skipping the bizarre post above...back to syzygyygyzys.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, population is THE issue. However, no solution to this issue other than economic development. The world is in a weird Catch 22...we need growth to bring billions in developing countries into aneducated lower family sized society. This eventually reduces population (and growth).
The big question is how much of the environment will change before any meaningful reduction happens. Before the turnaround. When populations peak in a 40 years what will the ecology of China, Nigeria, India, Indonesia, Brazil, etc. look like?
Solar power will be the energy source of the future. Solar power has been consistently following Moore's law and experiencing exponential growth for over 20 years. At current rate of growth Solar power will be the main source of energy within 20 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.theequitykicker.com/2012/09/25/solar-powera-case-study-in-exponential-growth/
That would be great if it occurs, but I am highly skeptical.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo all those who look only down, and also who look at the sky, FOR TODAY:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOCEANOGENIC POWER: clean, renewable, cold, scalable, enough, and cheap.
Too much for Panama.
http://challenge.ecomagination.com/ideas/OCEANOGENIC-POWER-Up-to-16000GW-of-Energ
Oil ROI, as financial people measure it, does not account for negative externalities (putting carbon in the atmosphere). The laws of physics will take their course, but the bill will not arrive until today's toddlers are middle aged.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWRONG:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"According to Peter Tertzakian, the chief energy economist at ARC Financial Corporation (and a very astute energy commentator), the EROI for the oil sands amounts to 7:1 for extraction and drops to 3:1 after it has been upgraded and refined into something useful such as gasoline. Several industry experts say that oil sand mines have an average EROI of 5:1 or much better returns than Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) plants. In fact, a detailed energy balance analysis sponsored by the Alberta Government for SAGD suggests that its EROI is close to 1:1. That makes bitumen a source of energy as pathetic and tragic as corn ethanol."
http://independentreport.blogspot.com/2012/03/tar-sands-too-inefficient-energy.html
"This article reviews 112 wind turbines from 41 different analyses, ranging in publication date from 1977 to 2006. This survey shows average EROI for all studies (operational and conceptual) of 24.6 (n=109; std. dev=22.3). The average EROI for just the operational studies is 18.1 (n=158; std. dev=13.7). This places wind energy in a favorable position relative to conventional power generation technologies in terms of EROI."
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/10/17/18478/085
When oil spurted out of the ground, 80 years ago, we could get 100 BTUs of energy, for each one used to get it. Now, we get 10 BTUs for each one used to get domestic oil. Wind energy returns about the same. The difference is that if we keep using oil, coal and natural gas we will "cook our goose and guarantee our grandchildren starve to death in floods” according to Jeremy Grantham in a recent interview with Charlie Rose.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDomestic oil 1930 100:1
Coal 2005 40:1
Hydroelectric 20:1
Imported oil 1970 27:1
Firewood 36:1
Imported oil 2005 18:1
Wind 10:1
Natural gas 10:1
Nuclear 5:1
Domestic oil 2000 10:1
PV 8:1
Tar sands 1:1
Biodiesel 2:1
Charles A.S. Hall and John W. Day, Jr. in “Revisiting the Limits to Growth After Peak Oil” in American Scientist, May-June, 2009
WRONG again! Nitrogen is also essential to plants, but get too much of it running off farms and into rivers, and you get state-sized "Dead Zones" like the one that forms at the mouth of the Mississippi.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEROEI is NOT accounted for in the price of fossil fuels. Since the EROEI for oil continually declined over the course of the 20th Century yet its price mostly trended downward (outside of geopolitical instability-caused spikes), your point is clearly invalid.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd according to your logic, solar and wind with EROEIs in the high teens and 20's should have displaced fossil fuels by now, but the MASSIVE subsidies fossil fuels have enjoyed for decades and the fact that fossil fuels get to use our environment as a dumping ground for their waste FOR FREE has kept that from happening.
Why are you skeptical?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf I understand, there are/will be, very large cavities, mostly underground, from the removal of fossil fuels.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWith Global Warming, either large sections of crust will sink, perhaps below the rising sea level, or will commence to float
EROI is a first law measure. One needs to invoke the second law to adequately address energy issues.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisdS (earth's envelope) > -dS (on-earth system)
Not so much...maybe you should do a little research first. The Earth's crust does not float, and you don't seem to understand how fossil fuels form / stay sequestered.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCertain types of organic matter have to accumulate and get buried faster than they can oxidize. THEN, a certain range of heat and pressure needs to be applied to the organic matter for a certain amount of time, usually many thousands to millions of years. The types of fossil fuels we can exploit are usually held in porous rock layers beneath an impermeable layer that keeps them from escaping from the reservoir. "Tight" gas and shale oil form in less porous rock that needs to be fractured, or "fracked", with high-pressure water and chemicals to release it. While "fracking" has led to huge spikes in small earthquake activity in some instances, in no way does the crust subside all that much.
It's not like fossil fuels are held in giant voids in the rock like you are thinking.
I don't know who the IDIOT is who made that list but the Swedish gov't report on its major 3.1 GW Nuclar LWR generation plant at Forsmark was full lifecycle EROEI of 74:1. Sounds to me they were using the Greenpeace/Storm van Leeuwen & Smith/Club of Rome plutocrat phony & many times demolished numbers:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisworld-nuclear.org/info/Energy-and-Environment/Energy-Analysis-of-Power-Systems/#.UUugLzfy9qw
And 1:1 for Tar Sands production, come on now, I know it is bad but 1:1 ?!? Give me a break, the lowest numbers come in at 3:1 and more optimistic at 6:1.
So don't post garbage.
Please see:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-worst-case-and-unfortunately-looking-almost-certain-to-happen-scenario.html
"If we don't act fast now all this could very well unfold unstoppably in the next year or two. Can't see it taking much longer than 10 or 20 at the most."
We don't have time to hassle windmills that won't work when the wind isn't blowing anyway.
Whether fossil fuels can power growth for some period of time is a very good question and a few commenters here seem to think that it may be able to do it long enough for some other energy source to take over. That's a matter for faith. However, a related question is about growth itself. As growth (remember that economic growth means more stuff and services being created, offered and used) destroys the environment in some way and depletes resources. On a finite planet, clearly growth must end (even if one imagines mining other solar system bodies) sometime. We seem to be struggling with growth right now. Is it all financial? Maybe but consider that an economy that grows at 5% per year will be twice as large within 14 years, four times as large within 28 years, and so on. It's not hard to realise (surely) that economic growth must end within a generation or two, if it hasn't already. I think it would be wise to plan for that end, given that our economy is predicated on growth and can't function properly (as we've seen), without growth to pay back debt with interest.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy can't I get to the 11-20 comments?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thissault
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou keep being untruthful regarding "massive subsidies" for oil companies. In the US oil drillers get about $5B per year in accelerated depreciation and that is it. Personally, I do not care if that was taken away, but it is by no measure a massive subsidity. BE HONEST IN DEFENSE OF YOUR BELIEFS.
I am skeptical about solar because I do not believe that the rate of conversion of phototons into electrons is likely to continue the rate of efficiency increase. I'd love it if this happens, but you run into physics issues and a need to discover new materials. We also have issues on battery and capacitor technology needing to advance, but that is a separate issue.
What does this even mean? "I am skeptical about solar because I do not believe that the rate of conversion of phototons[sic] into electrons is likely to continue the rate of efficiency increase."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe costs of solar power are coming down and retail electricity rates during the day are the highest price electricity that can be found. I've never claimed that solar power can supply 100% of our energy needs right now, but along with wind, water, geothermal, biomass, efficiency, grid flexibility / resiliancy, and nuclear power, we can kick our fossil fuel habit. This would be a lot cheaper than dealing with the costs of climate change and the 100s of billion$$$ in damages that pollution causes RIGHT NOW. It's only when you DON'T take a long-term systems approach to energy that fossil fuels make sense.
As far as fossil fuel subsidies, you forget that oil companies claim the vast majority of exemptions under the Domestic Manufacturing Tax Credit even though it is impossible for them to move an oil reservoir overseas, and a great deal of our actions in the Middle East are to keep the oil flowing out of there, and the auctions for mineral leases on public lands are totally broken and uncompetitive, cheating the government out of a billion dollars a year or more, and to top it all off, the damages from pollution are in no way accounted for in the cost of fossil fuels. To remedy this last point, we would have to mandate the most effective pollution control technologies possible (like the Clean Air Act demands), but we constantly allow polluting facilities to be "grandfathered" out of these requirements or we allow polluters to weasel out of these requirements with ever inventive excuses. Since this has happened for decades, dirty energy is artificially cheap, i.e. a beneficiary of government policy that amounts to a sizeable subsidy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI computed the distance that a 2013 Nissan Leaf could travel on a Gjoule and got about 1/4 the value shown on your chart. I think it might be prudent to take the values in the article with a grain of salt. Conspicuously missing is an EROI figure for "fracked" oil and natural gas, which seems awfully current. Also, one might observe that if those numbers are right, an awful lot of investors are wrong. This may, indeed, be so, but caution is advised.
@Sisko - There is a recent technology of vacuum powder insulation - sandwiching a low thermal conductivity powder between two walls, and then sucking the air out. It is about ten times better than insulators like fiberglass.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat it enables is efficient solar-thermal storage. You heat up a cheap storage medium like gravel when it is sunny, and extract the heat later to make steam and run a turbine generator. That solves the problem of solar only working when it's sunny.
This could be because thermal power plants throw away around 70% of the energy they get out of their fuel as waste heat. A Combined Cycle plant will usually reject 50% of the energy from its fuel as waste heat. Nothing wrong with this of course; it's just simple thermodynamics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs for energy efficiency of an EV once it's charged, 200 - 300 Wh per mile is what most people get depending on the amount of highway / city driving they do and how efficient they drive. You also have to realize that a gasoline-fueled vehicle uses nearly as much electricity to go 100 miles than what an EV like the LEAF uses because oil refining is an electricity hog. Add in ALL the energy inputs into the fuel supply chain for the gas vehicle and it becomes mind-boggling just how much we consume just to push our steel behemoths around the road. BTW, riding a bike can get you 900 mpg if your worried about this stuff.
1. Another term commonly used is "energy efficiency (EE)" which has been commonly used in the energy industry for decades. So EE = 1 - 1/EROI.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this2. EROI for coal is given as 18 and for oil sands as 5. Seems odd. This would give the coal a 94% energy efficiency (EE) which cannot be correct. I suspect the coal number doesn't include the burning of the coal itself whereas the oil sand number likely includes the burning of natural gas. If so them the coal number is an external EROI and the oil sands is a net number which is like comparing apples and oranges.
3. Where does the minimum EROI of 5 - 9 come from? It says a fuel with an EE of less than 80 to 89 % is unsuitable. Again this seems odd. A lot of oil has been produced with EEs in and below this range and at a good economic return. The article in the April issue says nothing about this minimum EROI. Seems like a serious omission.
It is impressing how Hall could manage to spread his wrong EROI evaluations for almost 30 years now, and still becomes interviewed as an "expert", even in high-ranking journals like SA. An interesting article, also discussing Charles Halls' very doubtable evaluations, just appeared on the high-ranking journal "Energy" here:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2013.01.029
It looks like Hall "adjusts" EROIs to look much better for solar and wind power, and to look much worse for nuclear power. He managed to reduce to EROI for nuclear by a factor of up to 20, just by combining outdated values for mining with old enrichment methods and by tweaking the lifetime to only 20 years (it is actually 40 years, now for many power plant extended to 60 years).
Re: gruprecht
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour citation indicates that you have entirely missed the point. We all know that the EROI of fossil fuels is higher than renewables, at least for now. The study you reference doesn't add any new information to this discussion, except perhaps that you don't read the articles you cite.
The take home here is that as EROI declines, prices should increase. We are not seeing the degradation of our fossil fuel resources reflected in price because of energy industry subsidies. Energy companies operating in the tar sands in Canada are receiving massive government subsidies in the form of low-cost natural gas and in price and tax breaks on capital and profit. We have begun to see a new upswing in the price of oil products reflected in gas station pricing and in the price of anything, like food, that is transported a significant distance.
Energy price increases in a depressed but somewhat stable economy indicate that the economy can, quite literally, only go down from here. Historically, prices peak during a period of growth because production (refinement) is, in comparison, rather steady. But we have not grown appreciably. Thus the increasing price of fossil fuels reflects a declining EROI as well as a less accommodating political environment for the sale of fossil fuels outside of fossil-fuel laden countries.
This situation is only likely to worsen, and refining capacity is unlikely to improve as we have to put ever more fuel into doing the work just to get more fuel. The system is straining due to a lack of easy energy represented by the glory days post WWII. One of Hall's main points, if you bother to read his other writing instead of criticising him based on an entirely incomplete understanding, is that nuclear power may play a significant role in the future transition to ultimately renewable energy.
Truly fascinating article, I may have to re-think my own position on oil-drilling. However, I do find it ironic that this study is highlighted when many also believe the same principle has not been applied to the educational system in the States. Puzzling. We seem to be spending more and more money on education in this country, yet our students are outperformed by countries who spend less. And when students do graduate from college they are often ill-prepared to face the challenges of adult life.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen talking about peak oil, many seem to overlook the fact, and I think that is because this product is used for less, for example, a quarter of the electricity production in USA. Here, coal is used to produce 50% of this energy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut when it comes to mechanical energy, which is managed directly by users, and moves the current civilization, continuing with USA: this product is used 300% of the electrical power and 1200% of the oil used for electricity.
So to start talking about to clean, truly, the economy, of the U.S. and the world, it is first necessary a real replacement of this product, in terms keep moving.
The answer is in Panama: OCEANOGENIC POWER, enough clean energy (scalable up for the whole world), cheap (less than 5 cents per kwh) and renewable, who finally makes viable, implement other discoveries, which together allow us to move at less than $ 1 a gge, and for several centuries.
For details:
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuario:Ocharpen
http://www.academia.edu/1478086/OCEANOGENIC_POWER