I väntan på Jesus

 

 

This Youtubevideo, "Global Oil Depletion | Alister Hamilton", posted on Youtube yesterday, was really interesting. There Scottish academic energy expert Alister Hamilton told about his academic work on UK:s North Sea oil industry and its exponentially (i.e. an accelerated decline rate) declining EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested). And he says that, with his own words (24:34 into the video), "and we get to the, if you like, the kind of, what we call the dead state, if you like, or the last treshold, at 2031, in terms of, our oil and gas system is not going to be net energy positive, in any sense, by 2031, which is only about seven years away". 

 

"Net energy positive" means an EROEI higher than 1:1 (1,1:1 and higher). To be net energy positive means that you have to get more energy out of your energy source than you use to get the energy out of the same energy source. This is extremely difficult to calculate, because, in some sense, our whole civilization is built around oil, as its master source of energy, yes, built to be able to harness this energy. This is especially visible in Saudi Arabia, but it is true also about the rest of our present industrial civilization, which really took off with the discovery of petroleum. 

 

This statement in the interview above, by Hamilton, is fully in line with what I know about the lousy oil reserves of the UK. The North Sea had only 2,75 Gb ( i.e. gigabarrels, which is billion barrels) of proven oil reserves left in the end of 2022, see this article. Observe how much the UK uses per year (about 0,5 Gb), and that the global oil use in one year, All Liquids, is a whopping 36,4 Gb nowadays. 

 

Hamilton also gives us the critical tresholds of a few other countries' oil industries, like Norway's and that of the US, especially Alaska's. Their oil industries are also in a precarious situation, similar to that of the UK. Norway is only one year after the UK for the beginning of the dead state. Alaska had it already 2021. The US already 2014, which is when the shale oil industry really took off. 

 

All this is fully in line with my own calculations of the decline of oil EROEI, in my book about the end of global net oil exports, that the EROEI of oil, All Liquids, was roughly about 100:1 a hundred years ago, and has declined by one out of those hundred, for about every year ever since, on average (which is an exponential decline of the EROEI), and that we were at 10:1 around 2020, and that we are about at 7-6:1 now, globally. I think also this is Hamilton's take on it, if I remember it correctly, he says it's 6:1 for oil. At least academic EROEI expert Dr. Paul E. Brockway and his colleagues had it at that level already in 2019 for all fossil fuels, in an academic paper in Nature energy, see the quote in (1) below. This number will decline to 1:1 around the 2030-2032 period, these years being a probable scenario for the end of all oil exports (All Liquids), which is when the zombie global oil industry only can survive by being subsidized by sucking up the life energy from all the rest of civilization. Ecological economist and academic EROEI expert Nate Hagens calls this kind of horror economy a "Mordor economy", and he already sees traits of it today. This is the end of civilization as we know it. So little time we have left. Everything I know about oil points in this direction. And I have studied Peak Oil since 2010, when Richard Heinberg introduced me to the concept. 

 

Somewhat along these lines is economist Paul Aho's article in Wattpoultry titled "The real problem with energy", from January 2011, where he writes: "Taking all the world oil sources and alternative sources together, the world EROEI ratio is now about 20 to 1." This was already 2011. Aho thought that the EROEI would be 10:1 in 2030, for all energy. This is an optimistic number for oil alone, although it could indeed be the case for all energy taken together (Aho's data are mainstream data, he is by no means pioneer or original). Civilization cannot survive a 10:1 for all energy taken together, according to EROEI expert and pioneer, professor Charles A.S.Hall (see this blogpost by Alice Friedemann from 2016, there Hall is quoted saying that global health care needs at least an EROEI of 10-11:1 for oil alone). And the decline is exponential (i.e. has an accelerated rate of decline) also from that point on. Civilization cannot even survive a number below 10:1 for oil alone, because civilization absolutely requires healthcare. Right now civilization is collapsing, slowly. And this blogpost offers some background info about this collapse, why it's happening. 

 

In the interview with Hamilton above, the grim fact surfaces that already now the oil industry in the North Sea has to use wind power from offshore wind farms. This is an exponentially growing predicament: we have to subsidize the dying oil industry with very, very expensive energy and technology, energy and technology which is exponentially more expensive all the time (among other things because the mining industry is in an exponential death march, because of, among other things, exponentially declining ore quality and exponentially more expensive energy. Observe that I mean with exponential an accelerated rate of decline), made only because of the massive help from the exponentially more expensive oil industry from the very beginning, in a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop. It's like the oil industry is cannibalizing itself through sucking into itself more and more energy and technology made out of its exponentially declining industry. This is especially visible in the shale oil industry in the US. 

 

 

Already now the UK is slowly collapsing, if one follows the British ecological economist Tim Watkins' blog "The consciousness of sheep". Tim could very well know Hamilton's work. 

 

In the interview with Hamilton, the interviewer told us that she had read in Hamiltons work, that cars, with an average life span of 13,9 years, bought in the 2020s, are going to run ouf of fuel before they actually have served their time. 

 

 

(1) "For decades, fossil fuels have been considered to be winners over renewables in terms of EROI. Estimates for the EROI for oil, gas, and coal typically come in at over 25:1, the researchers write. Meanwhile, the EROI for renewables is usually calculated to be less than 10:1.

However, those ratios are calculated at the primary stage where the fuel is first extracted and is in its original form. In reality, oil, natural gas and coal require energy to be converted into their final useful forms such as gasoline and electricity.

Paul E. Brockway and his colleagues calculate that when this transformation process is taken into account, the EROI for fossil fuels drops to around 6:1." (From this article from 2019)

 

 

 
(Chart taken from this page. Picture text on that page: From Euan Mearns at europe.theoildrum.com. “ERoEI” is Energy Returned on Energy Invested. The ERoEI of oil production has fallen from ~ 30:1 in 1970 to from 11 to 18: 1 in 2000.)