Among the non-renewable energy resources, that humanity should abandon as soon as possible to avoid climate catastrophe, are fossil fuels. We are facing a real trap: the world basically works thanks to fossil energy sources and is structurally dependent on them, but it should put in place as soon as possible an energy transition that would allow the decoupling of energy demand from the extraction and refining of gas, oil, and coal. In addition to this, there is another problem that is quite easy to understand: the "easy" fossil sources - including what was technically defined as "conventional oil" - are in fact exhausted, and recovering new resources is increasingly (energetically and economically) expensive. One of the indexes that in literature measures this difficulty is the EROI, acronym of "Energy Return On Investment", which is the ratio between the energy recovered (ER) and the energy invested (EI) to obtain it. This index, to get an idea, of the values involved, at the beginning of the 20th century, in the United States, was about 100:1, i.e., it took the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil to get 100. Less than a century later, in 1990, the value dropped to an average of 35:1, while in more recent years, up to the present day, despite the positive effects of energy efficiency, it has fallen progressively from 20:1 to 10:1 worldwide, as confirmed by Celi 2021 (1). (1) Celi L., 2021: Deriving EROI for Thirty Large Oil Companies Using the CO2 Proxy from 1999 to 2018, «Biophysical Economics and Sustainability» (2021) 6:12, DOI: 0.1007/s41247-021-00095-6
The EROI issue
Luciano Celi
2022
Abstract
Among the non-renewable energy resources, that humanity should abandon as soon as possible to avoid climate catastrophe, are fossil fuels. We are facing a real trap: the world basically works thanks to fossil energy sources and is structurally dependent on them, but it should put in place as soon as possible an energy transition that would allow the decoupling of energy demand from the extraction and refining of gas, oil, and coal. In addition to this, there is another problem that is quite easy to understand: the "easy" fossil sources - including what was technically defined as "conventional oil" - are in fact exhausted, and recovering new resources is increasingly (energetically and economically) expensive. One of the indexes that in literature measures this difficulty is the EROI, acronym of "Energy Return On Investment", which is the ratio between the energy recovered (ER) and the energy invested (EI) to obtain it. This index, to get an idea, of the values involved, at the beginning of the 20th century, in the United States, was about 100:1, i.e., it took the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil to get 100. Less than a century later, in 1990, the value dropped to an average of 35:1, while in more recent years, up to the present day, despite the positive effects of energy efficiency, it has fallen progressively from 20:1 to 10:1 worldwide, as confirmed by Celi 2021 (1). (1) Celi L., 2021: Deriving EROI for Thirty Large Oil Companies Using the CO2 Proxy from 1999 to 2018, «Biophysical Economics and Sustainability» (2021) 6:12, DOI: 0.1007/s41247-021-00095-6File | Dimensione | Formato | |
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