[ For a full understanding of EROI, which Hall invented in 1973 as a way of evaluating which energy resources could best replace fossil fuels, see Hall’s latest book: Hall, Charles A.S. 2017. Energy Return on Investment: A Unifying Principle for Biology, Economics, and Sustainability.  It’s a shame that EROI studies are still not funded well now that we’re on the edge of the Net energy cliff.

Here’s a quick overview of what Energy Returned On Invested means. What happens when the EROI gets too low? What’s achievable at different EROIs? (since this was published in 2008 Hall has estimated an EROI of up to 14 is required)

• If you’ve got an EROI of 1.1:1, you can pump the oil out of the ground and look at it.
• If you’ve got 1.2:1, you can refine it and look at it.
• At 1.3:1, you can move it to where you want it and look at it.
• We looked at the minimum EROI you need to drive a truck, and you need at least 3:1 at the wellhead.
• Now, if you want to put anything in the truck, like grain, you need to have an EROI of 5:1. And that includes the depreciation for the truck.
• But if you want to include the depreciation for the truck driver and the oil worker and the farmer, then you’ve got to support the families. And then you need an EROI of 7:1.
• And if you want education, you need 8:1 or 9:1.
• And if you want health care, you need 10:1 or 11:1.

Civilization requires a substantial energy return on investment. You can’t do it on some a low EROI fuel like corn-based ethanol, which has an EROI of around 1:1.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

Charles A. S. Hall.  2012. Energy Return on Investment. Post Carbon Institute.

Source: Hall, C.A.S., R. Powers, W. Schoenberg. 2008. Peak oil, EROI, investments and the economy in an uncertain future. Pimentel, D. (ed). Renewable Energy Systems: Environmental and Energetic Issues. Elsevier London

A short excerpt from this 24 page paper:

Real fuels must have EROIs of 5 or 10 or more returned on invested to not be subsidized by petroleum or coal in many ways, such as the construction of the vehicles and roads that use them. the scale of the problem can be seen by the fact that we presently use more fossil energy in the US than is fixed by all green plant production, including all of our croplands and all of our forests (Pimentel, D. Personal communication).

Energy and money are not the only critical aspects of development of energy alternatives. Recent work by Hirsch et al. (2005) has focused on the investments in time that might be needed to generate some kind of replacement for oil, should that be possible and peak oil occur.

They examined what they thought might be the leading alternatives to provide the US with liquid fuel or lower liquid fuel use alternatives, including tar sands, oil shales, deep water petroleum, biodiesel, high MPG automobiles and trucks and so on. They assumed that these technologies would work (a bold assumption) and that an amount of investment capital equal to “many Manhattan projects” would be available.

They found that the critical resource was time — once we decided that we needed to make up for the decline in oil availability these projects would need to be started one or preferably two decades in advance of the peak for there not to be severe dislocations to the US economy.  Given our current petroleum dependence, the rather unattractive aspects of many of the available alternatives, and the long lead time required to change our energy strategy the investment options are not obvious.

This, we believe, may be the most important issue facing the United States at this time: where should we invest our remaining high quality petroleum (and coal) with an eye toward insuring that we can meet the energy needs of the future.  We do not believe that markets can solve this problem alone or perhaps at all. Research money for good energy analysis unconnected to this or that “solution” simply are not available.

Human history has been about the progressive development and use of ever higher quality fuels, from human muscle power to draft animals to water power to coal to petroleum. Nuclear at one time seemed to be a continuation of that trend, but that is a hard argument to make today. Perhaps our major question is whether petroleum represents but a step in this continuing process of higher quality fuel sources or rather is the highest quality fuel we will ever have on a large scale.

Will Fossil Fuels Be Able to Maintain Economic Growth? A Q&A with Charles Hall

The inventor of the energy return on investment (EROI) metric argues that economic growth could soon stop—and that we need to get smart about incorporating the true cost of fuel in energy policies

Mar 19, 2013  By Mason Inman  Scientific American

“Drill, baby, drill” has become a slogan of those who want to produce more oil and gas and who scoff at alternatives to petroleum. But rarely mentioned is the expense required to get that oil and gas—and still more rarely mentioned is the energy required to access those resources.

Charles Hall, an ecologist at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, has spent most of his long career trying to get fellow researchers and the public to take a serious look at the energy required to get the energy we use. He is given credit for creating a measure known as the energy return on investment, or EROI—the ratio of energy output over energy input. (With oil, for example, the energy output would be the crude oil produced, and the energy input would be all that required to find the oil reservoir, drill the well and pump the oil out of the ground.) EROI is a crucial metric, Hall argues, because it helps us see which energy sources are high quality and which are not.

Hall and his students did pioneering work in this area, including a 1984 paper on the cover of Science. For many years, however, interest in the topic languished. But recent soaring oil prices and increasing difficulty of accessing new supplies have helped create economic hardships, leading to resurgent interest in EROI. Scientific American asked Hall to explain the basis of the EROI and how it pertains to our economy.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

You’re a self-described “nature boy” who became an ecologist. So how did you create the idea of energy return on investment (EROI)? I had this unbelievable doctoral advisor, H. T. Odum of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He said, “Well, Charlie, I don’t think anyone has thought about fish migration from a systems perspective.

I went down to the coast of North Carolina, looking for a place where I could do this research. And I found one: in this freshwater environment, where fish weren’t supposed to be migrating, they were migrating like crazy.

And you approached this migration mystery from an energy-use perspective. How did you do that? I measured the ecosystem productivity by the free-water oxygen technique. I measured it at five different places, upstream and downstream, and found some very clear patterns. The energy available to the fish was much more concentrated as you went upstream, and I developed this theory that the fish would migrate to capitalize on the abundance of energy for the first year or two of the life, and then the young fish would migrate downstream into a more stable but less productive environment.

The study found that fish populations that migrated would return at least four calories for every calorie they invested in the process of migration by being able to exploit different ecosystems of different productivity at different stages of their life cycles.

So from studying fish migration, was it a big leap to think about people and fossil fuels? No, probably because Howard Odum was evolving in his thought processes. He wrote a book Environment, Power and Society at about that time. An amazing thing working with Odum was, for him, there are just systems. It doesn’t matter if it’s a forested system or a stream system or an estuarine system, or whether people are there or not. It’s just a system—and systems have many similar patterns and many similar processes of consumption and production, and they often even have similar controls on them.

So, it was not difficult for me, because I was trained that way from Howard Odum. Also, when I was a graduate student there were a lot of very exciting things going on. Ecologists were much more involved—not just in biodiversity, which is where much of the focus is today, but in dealing with important issues of the relation of humans to resources. Paul Ehrlich [author of The Population Bomb (1968)], Garrett Hardin [known for his 1968 Science paper “The Tragedy of the Commons”], George Woodwell [founder of the Woods Hole Research Center], many other people—these were very influential to me as a graduate student.

For society’s energy sources, is it important to consider EROI? Is there a lot of oil left in the ground? Absolutely. The question is, how much oil can we get out of the ground, at a significantly high EROI? And the answer to that is, hmmm, not nearly as much. So that’s what we’re struggling with as we go further and further offshore and have to do this fracking and horizontal drilling and all of this kind of stuff, especially when you get away from the sweet spots of shale formations. It gets tougher and tougher to get the next barrel of oil, so the EROI goes down, down, down.

Is there some minimum EROI we need to have? Since everything we make depends on energy, you can’t simply pay more and more and get enough to run society. At some energy return on investment—I’m guessing 5:1 or 6:1—it doesn’t work anymore.

What happens when the EROI gets too low? What’s achievable at different EROIs? If you’ve got an EROI of 1.1:1, you can pump the oil out of the ground and look at it. If you’ve got 1.2:1, you can refine it and look at it. At 1.3:1, you can move it to where you want it and look at it. We looked at the minimum EROI you need to drive a truck, and you need at least 3:1 at the wellhead. Now, if you want to put anything in the truck, like grain, you need to have an EROI of 5:1. And that includes the depreciation for the truck. But if you want to include the depreciation for the truck driver and the oil worker and the farmer, then you’ve got to support the families. And then you need an EROI of 7:1. And if you want education, you need 8:1 or 9:1. And if you want health care, you need 10:1 or 11:1.

Civilization requires a substantial energy return on investment. You can’t do it on some kind of crummy fuel like corn-based ethanol [with an EROI of around 1:1].

A big problem we have facing the alternatives is they’re all so low EROI. We’d all like to go toward renewable fuels, but it’s not going to be easy at all. And it may be impossible. We may not be able to sustain our civilization on these alternative fuels. I hope we can, but we’ve got to deal with it realistically.

Do you think we’re facing limits to growth now? I think if you correct the U.S. GDP for debt—in other words, the debt is some kind of not-real growth—then I think the GDP hasn’t grown at all since 2005. It’s just grown through debt. I think clearly growth has declined; it’s possible that growth has either stopped or may soon stop.

We know that the middle class has not increased its income now for 20 years. Behind that—not always the immediate cause, but looking over the shoulder of the causes—I find the decline in the availability of energy.

It’s terrifying to people—politicians and economists—who base everything on growth. I think they won’t talk about it because the concept is terrifying.

Most economists think economic growth can continue indefinitely, right? It was easy to make economic theories that worked while we pumped more and more oil out of the ground, because whether you’re a capitalist or a communist or a this-ist or a that-ist, they’d work—because there was more oil to make them work. We could afford all the corruption and inefficiencies in the past and still have quite a lot trickle down.

But now the pie is not getting that much bigger. Now, it’s pretty clear that there’s a lot of economic theories that aren’t working very well.

How do these economic arguments relate to people’s day-to-day lives? Doesn’t it mean food on the table, a roof over your head, gas in your car—a car itself? So economics isn’t really about money. It’s about stuff. We’ve been toilet trained to think of economics as being about money, and to some degree it is. But fundamentally it’s about stuff. And if it’s about stuff, why are we studying it as a social science? Why are we not, at least equally, studying it as a biophysical science?

Hall recently co-authored a book on this biophysical perspective with economist Kent Klitgaard, Energy and the Wealth of Nations: Understanding the Biophysical Economy (Springer, 2011).

This is also a chapter in The Energy Reader: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth, Tom Butler, Daniel Lerch, and George Wuerthner, eds. (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2012).