An important lesson in energy mathematics
I had to change some things in this blogpost of mine, after an academic mathematician from Iran, Arash, who attends the same writing course as me, corrected me. In that blogpost I wrote, before I made the changes, that EROEI declines exponentially. It was not true. An exponential decline curve looks like this:
The curve of the EROEI of oil, is not like that, it is like this:
What is this curve called? I cannot find much about it when I search on Ecosia (an ecological search engine). But I have once read on the internet that oil geologist Jeffrey J. Brown called it "an accelerated rate of decline" curve*. He used that term when he wanted to describe the decline of oil exports. It's a long name, but I don't find any better. Neither Arash knew its name. So I will call it that.
So, reality was worse than what can be described with the name "exponential decline". An accelerated rate of decline is much, much more serious than an exponential decline. The first ends abruptly, the other never reaches its end, because the decline in the end is so slow and smooth, slower and slower as time goes by.
Excuse me for this failure, but I have only secondary school mathematics (högstadiematematik) to build upon.
An accelerated rate of decline means that the decline goes faster and faster as time goes by.
So your decline rate goes from 5 % to 7 % to 13% to 20 % to 29 % to 40 % to 55 %. You see the trend?
Albert Bartlett (1923-2013), the renowned professor pf physics, once said that "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
I will, based on the mathematics lesson above, make my own version of this statement. I would say that "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the accelerated rate of decline function."
This mathematic function, "the accelerated rate of decline", will seal our fate. It is our question of destiny.
You find almost nothing about it on the internet, when you google. Isn't that typical?
* "So, you look at exponential declines in oil production and hyperbolic—hyperbolic just means that the decline rate slows with time. Well, this is an accelerating decline rate. So, it’d start out like at 5% and then 10% and then 15% and 25%." (from this article by Brown and Chris Martenson, on September 15, 2015, originally published by the Peak Prosperity blog)
