A New Long Term Assessment of Energy Return on Investment (EROI) for U.S. Oil and Gas Discovery and Production

By M. C. Guilford, C. Hall, P. O’Connor, C. Cleveland. 2011

179 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Oil and gas are the main sources of energy in the United States. Part of their appeal is the high Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) when procuring them. We assessed data from the United States Bureau of the Census of Mineral Industries, the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the Oil and Gas Journal for the years 1919–2007 and from oil analyst Jean Laherrere to derive EROI for both finding and producing oil and gas. We found two general patterns in the relation of energy gains compared to energy costs: a gradual secular decrease in EROI and an inverse relation to drilling effort. EROI for finding oil and gas decreased exponentially from 1200:1 in 1919 to 5:1 in 2007. The EROI for production of the oil and gas industry was about 20:1 from 1919 to 1972, declined to about 8:1 in 1982 when peak drilling occurred, recovered to about 17:1 from 1986–2002 and declined sharply to about 11:1 in the mid to late 2000s. The slowly declining secular trend has been partly masked by changing effort: the lower the intensity of drilling, the higher the EROI compared to the secular trend. Fuel consumption within the oil and gas industry grew continuously from 1919 through the early 1980s, declined in the mid-1990s, and has increased recently, not surprisingly linked to the increased cost of finding and extracting oil.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1accb15d1a9ad9949c9c1dcf29e2b8ed5112b304

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In Environmental Engineering

1. C. Hall
2. C. King
3. Carl Folke
4. Reinette Biggs
5. B. Walker
6. Marten Scheffer
7. Garry D. Peterson
8. M. Dale

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

1. C. Hall
2. C. King
3. M. Dale
4. Stephen B. Balogh
5. D. Murphy
6. Jessica G. Lambert
7. Michelle Arnold
8. A. Gupta

Citations in the corpus

• EROI of different fuels and the implications for society (2014, unknown): “5 along with some important oil-related historical events (Cleveland et al., 1984; Hall et al., 1986; Guilford et al., 2011).”
• Energy, EROI and quality of life (2014, background): “Temperate latitude corn-based ethanol appears to have insuf fi cient EROI to be considered a viable source of net energy without subsidy (Hall et al., 2011).”
• Ten Years of Sustainability (2009 to 2018): A Bibliometric Overview (2018, background): “21 A new long term assessment of energy return on investment (EROI) for US oil and gas discovery and production [41] Guilford, M.”
• Order from Chaos: A Preliminary Protocol for Determining the EROI of Fuels (2011, background): “For example, the EROI of US and presumably global oil production generally increased during the first half of the 20th Century and has declined since (see Guilford et al. [11], this Special Issue).”
• The Post-growth Challenge: Secular Stagnation, Inequality and the Limits to Growth (2019, background): “Indeed, most EROEI studies across multiple countries show a declining EROEI in the last two to three decades (Hall et al., 2014; Guilford et al., 2011).”
• Synchronous failure: the emerging causal architecture of global crisis (2015, background): “Finally, the energetic cost of finding and producing new sources of oil continued to rise steadily, which meant that the energy return on investment (EROI) fell for both conventional and nonconventional sources (Guilford et al. 2011, Fournier et al. 2013, Murphy 2014, Hall et al. 2014).”
• Relating Financial and Energy Return on Investment (2011, methodology): “Both capital expenditures and the value of einvestment = 14 MJ/$2005 for capital, or indirect energy, are taken from Guilford et al. (2011) of this special issue of Sustainability [18].”