Forest Man

(Part 1 of this series and Part 2 of this series and Part 4 of this series)

 

According to the professional Dallas oil geologist Jeffrey J. Brown and Dr. Samuel Foucher, in the article "Declining net oil exports–a temporary decline or a long term trend?" (on Resilience.org on September 24, 2007), the volume of global net oil exports is, post global Peak Oil (which many think happened for All Fossil Liquids in November 2018), squeezed from two directions at the same time, from two exponential functions, from

 

1) exponentially rising consumption (world energy consumption, and especially oil consumption, has in fact been rising exponentially until now, see the article "World Energy Consumption Since 1820 in Charts", posted on March 12, 2012 on the blog Our Finite World by Gail Tverberg)

 

2) exponentially falling production (world oil production has fallen since 2018, and will continue to fall exponentially, see the article Peak Oil is Here! World oil production peaked in 2018, posted on February 1, 2022 by Alice Friedemann, on the blog Energy Skeptic)

 

According to the blog Crash Watcher in the blogpost An Export Land Model Analysis for the USA-Part 4, the volume of global net oil exports is also squeezed from a third exponential function, namely

 

3) exponentially falling EROEI (it is a fact that the EROEI, Enery Return on Energy Invested, has fallen exponentially until now, and it will continue to do so, in an accelerated rate of decline. See the article "Energy Return on Investment (EROI) for U.S. Oil and Gas Discovery and Production" by Matt Simmons on Peak Oil News & Message boards, January 25, 2013. A somewhat newer article about the same thing is Kurt Cobb's "The hidden reasons behind slow economic growth: Declining EROI, constrained net energy", on Resilience.org on April 5, 2015. This is also in full accordance with Richard Heinberg's statement already in 2014 that "costs of oil exploration/production is rising 10,9 % per year" (Douglas-Westwood) (quoted from his 2014 speech recorded on youtube titled "Richard Heinberg on Snake Oil: How Fracking's False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future"). Because of exponentially falling EROEI, this cost is rising even faster today, I suppose. These rising costs are a function of the exponentially falling EROEI. Here you have the reason why the shale oil industry is a Ponzi Scheme, a totally debt-fuelled and investment money-fueled operation, without real profits. 

 

When Crash Watcher did this third exponential squeeze upon his data, squeezing it with three exponential functions, it resulted in the volume of global net oil exports falling to zero well before 2030. I quote his blogpost above: 

 

 

And observe: then he did not even calculate the falling EROEI with an exponential function.

 

This result is in accordance with my own calculations, where the volume of global net oil exports will fall to zero in 2028 at the latest, see my calculations in my blogpost Some more Peak Oil Exports mathematics: The end of the global net oil export market in 2030 is in fact a best case scenario. Part 1., from 1.11.2022. 

 

In Jeffrey J. Brown's model, the volume of global net oil exports fell to zero somewhere between 2030 and 2032, depending on which of his articles you read, but, as I said, he did not take into account the third exponential function, the exponentially falling EROEI, which Crash Watcher in the blogpost above calculated would fall from 20:1 in 2010 to 2:1 in 2030, assuming a linear decline, not even calculating an exponential decline.

 

And now to the crucial thing: "Charles A. S. Hall, who has studied EROEI for most of his career and published in Science and other top peer-reviewed journals, believes that society needs an EROEI of at least 12 or 13:1 to maintain our current level of civilization." (From the blogpost Net Energy Cliff Will Lead to Collapse of Civilization, posted on December 11, 2019 by Alice Friedemann on the Energy Skeptic blog)

 

According to the article What is global EROI now? A Review of 2012 EROI of Global Energy Resources by Alice Friedemann, posted on January 16, 2013 on the blog Energy Skeptic, EROEI was 18:1 in 2006, which is somewhat similar to the calculations of “Crash Watcher”. I think we passed the 13:1-12:1 mark for global oil production (All Fossil Liquids) around 2018, at the latest, when All Fossil Liquids peaked, and the whole global civilization subsequently peaked, at the latest, with very conservative estimates.