EROEI of industrial civilization is declining with an accelerated rate of decline.
In the beginning of the history of the oil industry, in 1859, when the first commercial oil wells were drilled, you only needed to drill a hole in the ground, and oil gushed out of the ground, just out of the pressure in the oil well. Today you build giant deep water oil rigs to get the same amount of oil out of the ground. And the oil have to be pumped out, it does not gush out any more. In virtually all oil fields in the world. Or even worse, you use hydraulic fracturing (fracking) onshore, to get the last dregs of the oil reserves out of the rocks. A very, very costly and complicated process, which requires astronomical amounts of water, sand and chemicals. Just to get the same amount of oil out of the ground as they did in 1859.
This means that it costs more and more energy to get the energy out of the ground. You lose more and more energy in the process of obtaining energy. This energy cost is called "EROEI", "Energy Returned on Energy Invested". And it is the same as the "ROI", "Return on Investment", of conventional economics, it is only applied to energy.
This higher cost comes because of the "low hanging fruit-principle" (Richard Heinberg's term), that is, you exploit the easiest oil first, the most profitable oil first. This pertains to all energy sorts. And when conventional oil gets too expensive, you go first to unconventional oil (things like deep water oil, fracking, tar sands), then to all sorts of alternative energy, renewable energy, which have the lowest EROEI of all the energy sorts available. How low? Well, if oil in the beginning of the history of the oil industry had an EROEI of 100:1 (the EROEI ratio, this means it costs only 1 barrel of oil to produce 100 barrels of oil), Solar Panels, or Solar Photo Voltaics, had an EROEI of 2:1 to 3:1 in the beginning of the twentyfirst century, according to Charles A. S. Hall in the following very important paper (the EROEI of solar PV has improved much after that, though):
Charles A.S. Hall*, Jessica G. Lambert, Stephen B. Balogh. 2014. EROI of different fuels and the implications for society. Energy Policy 64: 141-152.
From the paper in chapter 2. "Meta-analysis of EROI values for various fuel sources", the authors say the following about the EROEI of solar PV:
"It should be noted that several recent studies that have broader boundaries give EROI values of 2 to 3:1 (Prieto and Hall, 2012, Palmer, 2013, Weissbach et al., 2013),"
In the blogpost Net Energy Cliff Will Lead to Collapse of Civilization from December 11, 2019, on the blog Energy Skeptic, Alice Friedemann writes: "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."
Just think about it. How big the difference is between 100:1 and 2:1, and between 12:1-13:1 and 2:1. The difference gets astronomical when you ponder this graph, how EROEI falls with an accelerated rate of decline:
(image taken from the blogpost "EROEI for beginners" on the blog Energy Matters, by Euan Mearns, on May 25, 2016. This vitally important chart is called "The Energy Cliff", a term coined by Mearns, a term often used by Steve St. Angelo on the SrsRocco Report blog, see more relevant stuff by St. Angelo in my suggestions for deeper study in the end of the post)
This is a simple chart, easy to understand. An EROEI ratio of 50:1 means that only 2 % of the energy obtained goes into producing more energy. The following calculations can help us to understand how this amount of energy invested grows exponentially as EROEI decline (it is from this blogpost of mine on this blog, where I try to calculate the future EROEI for the global oil industry) with an accelerated rate of decline:
2020: 10:1 (10 % of the energy obtained goes into producing more energy)
2021: 9,2:1: (11,7 % of the energy obtained goes into producing more energy)
2022: 8,5:1 (13,4 % of the energy obtained goes into producing more energy)
2023: 7,8:1 (15,1 % of the energy obtained goes into producing more energy)
2024: 7:1 (16,8 % of the energy obtained goes into producing more energy)
2025: 6,3:1 (18,5 % of the energy obtained goes into producing more energy)
2026: 5,5:1 (20,2 % of the energy obtained goes into producing more energy)
2027: 4,8:1 (21,9 % of the energy obtained goes into producing more energy)
2028: 4:1 (25 % of the energy obtained goes into producing more energy)
2029: 3:1 (33 % of the energy obtained goes into producing more energy)
2030: 2,5:1 (40 % of the energy obtained goes into producing more energy)
So, as you see here, in the beginning, when you go from 50:1 to 40:1, there is only a very marginal cost increase, from 2 % to 2,5 %. Then, for every point downwards, the cost increases exponentially, so that the difference between 4:1 and 3:1 is a huge 8 %. And from 3:1 to 2:1 it is even more huge, 17 %, and from 2:1 to 1:1 the difference is astronomical, it is 50 %. This pertains to all exponential functions. It is the last doubling that catches you by surprise.
So even if the calculated EROEI values (as in the graph below) over the years decline linearly, EROEI can still decline with an accelerated rate of decline. Don't be fooled by this chart (in Charles A.S.Hall et. al.'s paper above, from 2014):
So what is the EROEI of the global energy sector right now, on the whole? In this blogpost on the blog Energy Skeptic, from December 11, 2019, Alice Friedemann writes:
"In the USA in 1930 an “investment” of the energy in 1 barrel of oil produced another 100 barrels of oil, or an EROEI of 100:1. That left 99 other barrels to use to build roads, bridges, factories, homes, libraries, schools, hospitals, movie theaters, railroads, cars, buses, trucks, computers, toys, refrigerators – any object you can think of, and 500,000 products use petroleum as a feedstock (see point #6). By 1970 EROEI was down to 30:1 and in 2000 it was 11:1 in the United States."
I once heard or read someone say that EROEI for civilization as a whole is 11:1 right now.
It could be true. Just think about the following words in the ingress to this scientific paper from 2009:
"Gagnon et al. (2009) estimated the EROI for global publicly traded oil and gas. Their analysis found that EROI had declined by nearly 50% in the last decade and a half."
Remember then that the EROEI declines with an accelerated rate of decline, faster and faster.
In the abovementioned paper by Charles A.S. Hall et. al., we read the following in 4.1:
"The EROI for petroleum production appears to be declining over time for every place we have data. Gagnon et al. (2009) were able to generate an approximate “global” EROI for private oil and gas companies using the “upstream” financial database maintained and provided by John H. Herold Company. These results indicate that the EROI for publicly-traded global oil and gas was approximately 23:1 in 1992, 33:1 in 1999 and 18:1 in 2005 (Fig. 4). This “dome shaped” pattern seems to occur wherever there is a long enough data set, perhaps as a result of initial technical improvements being trumped in time by depletion."
These were global numbers. So if EROEI declined from 33:1 in 1999 to 18:1 in 2005, it may well be 11:1 today, or even less, because of the low EROEI of shale oil (1) and tar sands (2), which has grown to become a big part of the oil industry.
In the list above with my calculations of future EROEI:s, I calculated that EROEI for the global oil industry in 2030 would be 2,5:1, i.e. 40 % of the energy obtained will go into producing more energy. We are done by then. Collapse will come before that.
* * *
If you google for "EROEI declines with an accelerated decline rate", you won't find almost anything about it (I only found this article from May 16, 2020). Although to understand this is one of the most important things society can do today. It is the same as with global warming (as I wrote in this blogpost), almost no one mentions that global warming is exponential.
For deeper study:
"ERoEI for Beginners". May 25, 2016
"Steve St. Angelo: The World is Heading for an Energy Cliff" on Youtube, October 14, 2021.
"Diminishing Returns, Energy Return on Energy Invested, and Collapse". December 6, 2013,
* "the Godfather of EROEI analysis who developed the concept during his PhD studies and first published the term in 1977." (according to Euan Mearns in this blogpost)
(1) "The two methods of processing synthetic crude from organic marlstone in demonstration or small-scale commercial status in the U.S. are in situ extraction and surface retorting. The considerable uncertainty surrounding the technological characterization, resource characterization, and choice of the system boundary for oil shale operations indicate that oil shale is only a minor net energy producer if one includes internal energy (energy in the shale that is used during the process) as an energy cost. The energy return on investment (EROI) for either of these methods is roughly 1.5:1 for the final fuel product." (from this paper by Cutler J. Cleveland and Pete O'Connor, 2011)
(2) "Our EROI estimates for tar sands fall within the range of previously published studies. Brandt et al. provide the most detailed analysis of tar sands yet. They find EROI values for tar sands (from both surface mining and in situ extraction, with direct energy only) fluctuating between 2.5:1 and 4:1 during the period from 1990 to 2003, very similar to our results." (from this blogpost by Alice Friedemann on the blog Energy Skeptic, May 21, 2016)
