REVIEW: Investigating the Energy Return on Energy Investment for Global Oil and Gas

[profgoose]

http://netenergy.theoildrum.com/node/5600

A very important concept, not just for oil and gas, but for alternatives as well--why we need even more investment in alternatives than we already have...imho.

This post reviews a paper by Nate Gagnon, Charles Hall and Lysle Brinker titled: “A Preliminary Investigation of Energy Return on Energy Investment for Global Oil and Gas Production,” published recently in the peer-reviewed journal Energies. The lead author was my colleague for two years at SUNY-ESF and the second author is currently my Ph.D. advisor and has published numerous guest posts here on The Oil Drum. See here for a list of previous posts relating to work by Dr. Charles Hall, and here to download a full-text PDF of this paper.

ABSTRACT: Economies are fueled by energy produced in excess of the amount required to drive the energy production process. Therefore any successful society’s energy resources must be both abundant and exploitable with a high ratio of energy return on energy invested (EROI). Unfortunately most of the data kept on costs of oil and gas operations are in monetary, not energy, terms. Fortunately we can convert monetary values into approximate energy values by deriving energy intensities for monetary transactions from those few nations that keep both sets of data. We provide a preliminary assessment of EROI for the world’s most important fuels, oil and gas, based on time series of global production and estimates of energy inputs derived from monetary expenditures for all publicly traded oil and gas companies and estimates of energy intensities of those expenditures. We estimate that EROI at the wellhead was roughly 26:1 in 1992, increased to 35:1 in 1999, and then decreased to 18:1 in 2006. These trends imply that global supplies of petroleum available to do economic work are considerably less than estimates of gross reserves and that EROI is declining over time and with increased annual drilling levels. Our global estimates of EROI have a pattern similar to, but somewhat higher than, the United States, which has better data on energy costs but a more depleted resource base.

[orwell]

1. At 18:1 I wonder...

...how it oil/gas compares to the alternatives. I suspect it is still favorable.

The trend however should alarm the oil crash skeptics. It is pretty clear that the era of cheap oil is rapidly coming to a close.

Thanks for the post.