The Oil Drum: Europe

Monday at 12 EST Jay Hanson, of dieoff.org 'fame', will be Jason Bradford's guest on Global Public Media's "The Reality Report". It can be heard live at www.kzyx.org. (The last few times we advertised a guest, the station had bandwidth issues but we will post a link on TOD to the archived version in a week or so for those who want to hear it.)

Dieoff.org, despite it's unwelcoming moniker, was (is?) one of the biggest clearinghouses on the internet for referenced work on general resource depletion and likely human responses to it and probably the first to attempt to 'connect the many dots'. As many of you know, I got my own exposure to some of the issues related to overpopulation, our biological underpinnings and peak oil from perusing dieoff.org, which Jay Hanson constructed during many years of solitary reading and research. I highlighted Jay Hansons 'farewell address' to his listserv as one of my first posts on this site.

This is a guest post by Roger Brown, known as Roger K, whose graduate work was in physics. In reading about net energy and EROEI, he realized that energy balance alone is insufficient for characterizing the economics of energy production. In this post, he develops a multi-variable approach to account for the cost of other production resources. This post is the first publication of his innovative ideas. A summary is available at the end of the post.

Labor Cost of Energy

In order to produce an economic output, you have to invest production resources. At a minimum some amount of human labor must be invested. There is no such thing as a labor-free production process. Even if you lived in a sparsely inhabited tropical paradise filled with streams jumping with large tasty fish and heavily laden fruit trees growing profusely in the natural forests, you would still have to spend some amount of time gathering fruit and fish.

If you could gather all the food you needed for a single day in a half hour of work, then your food would be very cheap. If you lived in a less productive natural environment and had to spend eight hours a day gathering all of the food you needed, then your food would be very expensive.

This is a guest post by Adam Dadeby (Adam1). Adam is currently studying towards an MSc in Renewable Energy and the Built Environment with the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales, UK.

What is EROEI?

Energy returned on energy invested (EROEI or EROI) is a concept that mirrors the financial metric, return on investment (ROI). In order to make an energy gain or “profit”, energy or work must be consumed or exerted (Cleveland, C.J., 2001, p.1¹). The energy gain or profit often referred to as “net energy”. EROEI is usually expressed as a ratio, or occasionally as a percentage. EROEI can also be represented diagrammatically in simplified form (Fig. 1).

Figure 1: EROEI
(Charles Hall, Pradeep Tharakan, John Hallock, Wei Wu and Jae-Young Ko, Advances in Energy Studies Conference, Porto Venere, Italy, September 2002)²

The energy referred to in EROEI can be energy to run technology, such as liquid fuels for transport or electricity for lighting. It can however refer to energy in a form that can be taken in directly by living organisms: food.

This is an updated post on the energy return on energy invested on Canadian natural gas by Jon Freise. Jon's initial draft of this analysis, and related comments, can be found here.

An intermittent but longstanding theme here on theoildrum is that dollars do not sufficiently inform us of the long term details of energy depletion, and that the inexorable race between technology and depletion can be better understood using biophysical methods. Essentially this post suggests that it is requiring more and more energy to procure the same amount of natural gas in Canada, and this trend will likely continue into the future. This update makes the initial analysis too pessimistic on the rate of EROI NG decline but also too conservative on the absolute level of energy return. It is going to be a very interesting few years as Canada declines, Barnett peaks, and Haynesville and other unconventional plays ramp up. The treadmill spins on.

This is a repost from Cutler Cleveland on the underlying principles of net energy. We previously highlighted Dr. Clevelands work on the Energy Return from Wind. This post is Professor Clevelands latest installment on net energy analysis at the Encyclopedia of Earth, which I have reformatted to theoildrum. The Encyclopedia of Earth, where Prof. Cleveland is an editor/director, is a great academic/content based web clearinghouse for information on earth and our environment. I encourage everyone to follow some of the hyperlinks in the below story and peruse that site.

Outside of taxes and profits, we are a society used to thinking in gross terms. But the net is what we get to use. Net energy analysis, (and its subset EROI) get alot of airtime in peak oil discussions, but not yet in public. If the world is running on a certain total energy surplus, what are the implications for a decline in this surplus? Will the market, via dollars, treat gross production the same and forget to factor in increased costs? There seems to be much disagreement as to how best to use EROI and net energy principles, if at all, in planning for the looming energy crisis.

This is a guest post from Cutler Cleveland. It provides an excellent big picture overview of what variables we need to consider as we transition away from fossil fuels. Professor Cleveland previously wrote "Energy From Wind - A Discussion of the EROI Research", and "Ten Fundamental Principles of Net Energy" posted on theoildrum.com. Cutler Cleveland is a Professor at Boston University and has been researching and writing on energy issues for over 20 years. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Earth, Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Energy, the Dictionary of Energy and the Journal of Ecological Economics.

Prometheus chained to Mount Caucasus. Source: Pieter Paul Rubens: ''Prometheus Bound,'' 1611-1612, Oil on canvas, 95 7/8" x 82 1/2". (Philadelphia Museum of Art: The W.P. Wilstach Collection) Click to Enlarge

The hydrogen and ethanol powered car

[Editor's note, 10:30 UK Tuesday: Andris now has 44 excellent comments to contemplate (up from 10 on Friday). All are well worth reading. If you feel strongly about this then please leave him a message.]

(New readers, click "there's more" below for the whole article...)

Global Total Liquids production and oil price, January 2002 to present. Production data from the IEA, data files supplied by Rembrandt Koppelaar. Monthly average WTI oil prices from Economagic.

With oil reaching $135 / barrel, Oil Drum readership exceeding 30,000 unique visitors per day and many wild stories circulating in the MSM as to why oil prices are so high this post strives to explain why oil prices are rising exponentially:

• Supply and demand
• Decline of older fields
• Declining net energy and energy density
• New mega-projects
• OPEC spare capacity
• Peak exports

This is the final piece of a series on Energy Return on Investment from Professor Charles Hall's EROI Workshop at SUNY. Today's papers outline the energy technologies of wave and geothermal power, concluding a 5 part series that has looked at Why EROI Matters, Natural Gas and Imported Oil, Tar Sands and Shale Oil, Nuclear Power, and Passive Solar, Photovoltaic, Wind, and Hydro-electric. Previously, Professor Hall also wrote the thought provoking, At $100 Oil, What Can the Scientist Say to the Investor. Forget not about the simple 'balloon graph' below of EROI x Scale for fossil and renewable energy sources that this project is attempting to update with the help of theoildrum.com readership.

This is third in a series of six guest posts by Professor Charles Hall of the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry describing the energy statistic, "EROI" for various fuels. As has been discussed often on this site, net energy analysis is a vitally important concept - just as we primarily care about our take home pay which is our salary minus the taxes, we should care about our 'take home' energy, which is what is left after energy costs have been accounted for. As important as it is, this measure is not easy to quantify, as: a)data is almost always measured in $ as opposed to energy terms, b) parsing non-energy inputs (and outputs) into energy terms is difficult, and c) analysis boundaries (including environmental impacts) are very disparate. As such, there is not (has not yet been) a consistent formula for EROI applied to all energy studies that has led to policymakers and analysts speaking the same language in useful ways. The lead paper in this months Royal Academy of Sweden's journal AMBIO will be about such an EROI framework, and we will link to it when it comes online.

Professor Hall has been working in this area for over 30 years. Below are net energy analysis from Hall's group on the unconventional oil sources from tar sands and oil shaletwo resources that theoretically are enormous in energy scale, but practically are limited by flow rates, costs, and externalities. Just how limited is the subject of todays two-part informative post is below the fold. Remember, any specific numerical help via referenced literature, personal experience or knowledge to better inform Dr. Hall and his students would be appreciated.