Oil System Collapsing so Fast It May Derail Renewables

Article subtitle:

Oil and gas industries are cannibalising themselves as the costs of fossil fuel extraction mount

Article author:

Nafeez Ahmed

Article publisher:

Byline Times

Article date:

9 October 2021

Article category:

Our American Future

Tags:

economy

energy

society

Article link:

Excerpts are included below - read the original complete article

Medium

Article Body:

A team of French government energy scientists are warning that the collapse of the global oil system is coming so rapidly it could derail the transition to a renewable energy system if it doesn’t happen fast enough. In just 13 years, global oil production could enter into a terminal and exponential decline, accompanied by the overall collapse of the global oil and gas industries over the next three decades.

But this is not because the earth is running out of oil and gas. Rather, it’s because they are increasingly eating themselves to stay alive. The oil and gas industries are consuming exponentially more and more energy just to keep extracting oil and gas. That’s why they’ve entered a downwards spiral of increasing costs of production

Energy Return On Investment (EROI)

The key to understanding all this is in how the new study, published in Elsevier’s Applied Energy journal, applies the concept of ‘Energy Return On Investment’ (EROI).

Pioneered by systems ecologist Professor Charles Hall (whom I worked with on my book Failing States, Collapsing Systems) EROI measures how much energy you must use to extract energy for a given resource or technology. , diminishing profits, rising debt and irreversible economic decline....

iN 1950, the EROI of global oil production was really high, at about 44:1 (meaning, for every unit of energy we put in, we were getting a whopping 44 out). Yet as the graph below from the new study illustrates, this value has undergone a shockingly steep decline.

By 2020, it reached around 8:1, and is projected to decline and plateau to around 6.7 from 2040 onwards.

By 2024 – within the next four years – the amount of energy we are using for global oil production is going to increase to 25% of energy production. In other words, the world will be using a quarter of the energy produced from oil just to keep producing that oil.....

By 2050, fully half of the energy extracted from global oil reserves will need to be put back into new extraction to keep producing oil. The authors have an interesting name for this self-defeating phenomenon: they call it, “energy cannibalism.”