EROI of different fuels and the implications for society

By C. Hall, Jessica G. Lambert, Stephen B. Balogh. 2014

644 citations recorded by the source corpus.

All forms of economic production and exchange involve the use of energy directly and in the transformation of materials. Until recently, cheap and seemingly limitless fossil energy has allowed most of society to ignore the importance of contributions to the economic process from the biophysical world as well as the potential limits to growth. This paper centers on assessing the energy costs of modern day society and its relation to GDP. Our most important focus is the characteristics of our major energy sources including each fuel's energy return on investment (EROI). The EROI of our most important fuels is declining and most renewable and non-conventional energy alternatives have substantially lower EROI values than traditional conventional fossil fuels. At the societal level, declining EROI means that an increasing proportion of energy output and economic activity must be diverted to attaining the energy needed to run an economy, leaving less discretionary funds available for “non-essential” purchases which often drive growth. The declining EROI of traditional fossil fuel energy sources and the effect of that on the world economy are likely to result in a myriad of consequences, most of which will not be perceived as good.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/186bcc5981a0618a4af40e54d82d824bf721d4ca

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In Environmental Engineering

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

Citations in the corpus

Renewable Energy Development as a Driver of Economic Growth: Evidence from Multivariate Panel Data Analysis (2019, background): “On the other hand, in developed countries renewable energy is often generated from solar farms and wind farms, which makes significant contributions to capital formation [21].”
The Post-growth Challenge: Secular Stagnation, Inequality and the Limits to Growth (2019, background): “The end of the period shows another slight upturn in the EROEI associated with the emergence of ‘unconventional’ oil sources, but these sources are themselves generally regarded as having a lower quality (lower EROEI) than conventional sources (Hall et al., 2014).”
Energy expenditure, economic growth, and the minimum EROI of society (2016, background): “and first generation biofuels respectively around 15–20:1, 4–6:1, and 1–2:1 (Hall et al., 2014).”
Dynamic Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) and material requirements in scenarios of global transition to renewable energies (2019, methodology): “Moreover, in the long term, the EROI of non-renewable fuels will tend to decrease due to geological depletion; indeed, recent analyses have found that this trend is already ongoing, trends which will be exacerbated by the growing share of unconventional fuels characterized by lower EROI [9,36,49,50]”
Economic Growth, Income Distribution, and Climate Change (2018, positive): “We also abstract from the varying abilities of energy sources to provide usable work for economic processes (Ayres and Warr, 2009; Hall et al., 2014).”
Potential for hydrogen and Power-to-Liquid in a low-carbon EU energy system using cost optimization (2018, background): “It has been argued [194] that PtL actually leads to a net CO2 increase compared to fossil alternatives and to higher energy consumption [191] with conventional oil having around 20 EROI (Energy Return On energy Invested) [195], while PtL will have an EROI lower than 1 leading to an increase in prima”