Gail Tverberg, the actuary, wrote the following in the article posted by Jay Hanson:

”Commenters frequently remark that such-and-such an energy source has an Energy Return on Energy Invested <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested> (EROI) ratio of greater than 5:1, so must be a helpful addition to our current energy supply. My finding that the overall energy return is already too low seems to run counter to this belief. In this post, I will try to explain why this difference occurs. Part of the difference is that I am looking at what our current economy requires, not some theoretical low-level economy. Also, I don’t think that it is really feasible to create a new economic system, based on lower EROI resources, because today’s renewables are fossil-fuel based, and initially tend to add to fossil fuel use.”

It is true that alternative energy installations that employ photovoltaic cells, for example, incur heavy energy investment expense before any energy at all is returned.  In a US-type market economy, the fossil-fuel debt that must be incurred early in the life cycle of such an installation might never be repaid.  That is because, in a market economy, significant energy investment expense is required just to operate the market ^[1].  This expense is never recorded in conventional approaches to ERoEI analysis such as Charlie Hall’s methodology which has received widespread attention.  Moreover, the energy costs of private profit, borrowing money, paying taxes, paying adequate wages to employees and other economic actors who make part-time contributions to producing energy such as the energy employee’s health-care providers, auto mechanics, tax accountants, and other indirect energy expenses at all levels, including, for instance, the appropriate pro-rata share of the energy executive’s insurance company’s actuary, are not counted.  Thus, Gail – or anyone else – has no idea if EROI = 5 is adequate or not.

In ERoEI* (pronounced “E R o E I star”) as described at http://dematerialism.net/eroeistar.htm and on my blog at http://eroei.blogspot.com/ all of these and every other facet of energy technology that influences sustainability and whether or not the technology will actually be employed is considered; so, when the analysis is complete, the analyst knows that an ERoEI* greater than 1.0 is adequate with as much certainty as went into the collection of his raw data.

In “Energy in a Mark II Economy” I analyzed the meaning of the ratio of Total Energy Budget over Gross Domestic Product for an entire economy, some form of which the DOE records for every nation and every year.  It might be interesting to obtain similar ratios for each individual sector including the government and finance sector to aid in converting Gail’s monetary expenses into appropriate energy expenses.  If nothing else, we could then determine if Gail’s threshold figure of 5.0 make any sense at all.

[1]   In “Energy in a Mark II Economy” I employed the figure of 22% of the total energy budget that the US Department of Energy (DOE) charges directly to commerce.   Of course, some portion of the energy consumed by transportation and manufacturing should be charged to commerce and finance as well.  Moreover, if an entrepreneur extracts a large profit from his – usually subsidized – renewable energy business and builds an overly large house, additional energy costs should be charged to the energy installation.  This amounts to some fraction of the energy charged by the DOE to the residential sector.  In “Energy in a Natural Economy” I found a rough estimate of the energy overhead of the US market economy by looking at Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

In the entry of July 11^th of http://eroei.blogspot.com/ I wrote the following paragraph in connection with establishing a reasonably sane monetary system partly in response to Gail Tverberg’s list, which I now repeat.

Our crisis has a physical component and an imaginary component. The physical component comes from limitations in the quantities of land, water, consumable energy, and the environment itself. The ecological footprint of the human race exceeds the carrying capacity of Earth. The imaginary component is instability in the monetary system caused by excessive debt and excessive monetary inequality. To ameliorate the physical crisis we must eliminate the imaginary one. I do not mean that indebtedness, poverty, and wealth are imaginary; but, rather, that we can eliminate all three with the application of our imaginations without affecting the physical universe. Stabilizing our population and reducing our ecological footprint will ultimately have a desirable effect upon the universe.

Regardless of what the people want, the owners of the country want to retain their positions of power, privilege, and wealth. Naturally, they despise the idea of government control of the economy and the means of production; however, when a crisis arises that they cannot handle, they readily accede to crisis socialism to save them. During World War II, without adopting socialism completely, they allowed rationing, wage and price control, and management of vital industries by government employees even if they were paid only one dollar per year.

To respond appropriately to resource and environmental limits, we need to establish crisis socialism. However, to eliminate debt, we need to repudiate the US dollar; and, to eliminate inequality, we need to pay everyone the same even if no work can be found for them to replace the inessential work from which they were furloughed to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels and our ecological footprint. After all, the requirement that every citizen does useful work to get paid and the requirement that the pay should be commensurate with the value of the work are completely imaginary. The idea that everyone should be allowed to get as much money as he can is completely wrong.  (One of the reasons Dematerialism is right and everything else is wrong is that any society in which it is possible for one person to acquire more wealth than another is doomed.)

13 Comments on "Must every “renewable” energy technology incur a fossil-fuel debt that will never be repaid?"

Arthur on Sun, 11th Aug 2013 1:42 pm 



“because today’s renewables are fossil-fuel based, and initially tend to add to fossil fuel use.””

The usual widely spread mispercentptions about the so-called indispensableness of fossil.

Yes it is true that ‘today’s renewables’ need fossil fuel to come into being in the first place and ‘tenf to add to fossil fuel use’. But it is equally true that once a sufficient large renewable energy base has been installed, you can use that energy base to add to the installed base, as long as the renewable energy base has a sufficiently large eroei. And meanwhile both solar (>10) and wind (>20) satisfy that condition. Unfortunately, wecannot afford to use the energy harvest from renewables solely to produce new renewables. We are forced to use a big part of the energy harvest to ‘pay the regular energy bills’. There would have been no problem is we had started the transition 40 years ago, when the report from the Club of Rome came out. But we did not, it was more important to engage in an arms race so the Soviets could be buried as a political force, rather than to be patient and wait for the moment that the Soviets were forced to bury itself (as any communist system sooner or later is forced to do).

“One of the reasons Dematerialism is right and everything else is wrong is that any society in which it is possible for one person to acquire more wealth than another is doomed.”

History shows quite the opposite: absolute equality means killing of all incentive to really achieve, because it does not make a difference; the desastrous result is that in the end nobody will put an effort into anything. It is the perfect recipe to fully destroy a society, as the example of bolshevik Russia has shown. Some people never learn. Bolshevism is an ideal biotope for those without talent, those who would like to do nothing and parasitize on others.

DC on Sun, 11th Aug 2013 2:40 pm 



Arthur, I am little mystified by your last paragraph there. I dont recall history teaching us anything like ‘equality=nobody putting any effort into anything’. If, the old SU is your favorite whipping boy for no one putting any effort into anything, which is questionable logic at best, then I would suggest your barking up the wrong tree. .In our age, US marketed winner-take-all corporate welfare capitalism is doing a fine job of destroying society as well. I could put if another way by stating I am not sure what criteria is for ‘success’. Sure nobody likes a mooch or a freeloader-that is a given, but most people dont really like vampire capitalists that much either do they? The only difference is, the vampires own the presstitute media, one of whose main tasks-is, not surprisingly, to extoll the virtues of said vampire welfare capitalism to the population at large.

In any event, the authors point is well taken regardless of whatever political talking point hay ones wants to make of it. He is saying, Inequality is driving environmental destruction, and extreme inequality simply drives even greater destruction. And he is skeptical of the idea that renewables can power an inequality driven society in a manner acceptable to its elites, and probably a lot of others who mainly live off the table scraps the elites allow to hit the ground-so to speak.

No, renewables killer problem is not that they require FF to construct. Its that we seem to want the best of both worlds, we want suburbia, cars only transportation, Wall Mart and its GMO frankenfood depts. IoW, everything renewables wont able to provide on the scope or scale we feel were entitled to. But we also want renewables too, because they help us feel a little less guilty about our massive over-consumption of well…everything.

Have you not been reading Dmitry Orlov’s latest series on ‘Communities that Abide’? Those are very ‘communist’ by any definition, yet the successful ones hardly consist of everyone laying around on the couch all day waiting for there welfare check to arrive in the mail. A lot of the people in those work pretty hard actually, some of them have accomplished quite a bit-provided your definition is ‘success’ is appropriately scaled of course.

BillT on Sun, 11th Aug 2013 3:35 pm 



Technology is a byproduct of excess energy and resources, nothing more.

The excess of Egypt was that they had plenty of food and gold in a time that no one else did, until they didn’t.

Rome had the legions that took what they needed to prosper until there was nothing left to take.

Ditto for every other Empire since. The current one is nothing new, just the world wide scale of it’s reach and it’s money system. The world’s excess energy is running out as are all of the other resources. That means world-wide collapse and the end of BAU or even the shadow of BAU. Or War. Or Both.

bobinget on Sun, 11th Aug 2013 4:25 pm 



Both posters, Arthur and DC make interesting points but I take issue with both of their conclusions.

Central reasons I disagree with American LNG exports;

As this gas will be burned in any event, it should be
used here to create future livable conditions.

Back in the day, as the Soviet Union was collapsing there existed a US movement named ‘Conversion’.
Converting from a cold war economy to a peaceful one. OK, but the name sticks around.
Converting from fossil fuels to the half dozen ‘practical alternatives’ will take all the current load of finite
lower cost natural gas now available after conventional needs, power generation, fertilizer, chemical production etc.
Creating unnatural shortages through export, driving NG prices to excess profitability is the last thing we need.

Right wing Anti Science Movement propaganda has been so effective we see folks from the political left
mouthing words like ‘frankenfood’ and knee jerk reactions to new, as yet improperly regulated technologies like fracking while all but ignoring the millions coal desiccated, shortened lives.

All energy production has it’s share of disagreeable side effects.

I’ll argue slamming solar PV production for excessive
EROI is the sort of thing defenders of status quo will say to defend continued fossil fuel exploitation.
In short, we need healthy pragmatism to sort out what is the least harmful way to proceed based on science and not religion or politics.

Jerry McManus on Sun, 11th Aug 2013 5:04 pm 



I find Gail’s posts, and by extension this one also, to be thoughtful, well researched, firmly rooted in fact, and most importantly not afraid to take full account of the magnitude of human ecological overshoot.

People lost in techno fantasies of so-called “renewables” on the other hand I find to be generally blind, deaf, and dumb.

However, just to be fair, let’s give them the benefit of a doubt. If so-called “renewables” are as easy, cheap, and bountiful as is claimed, then by all means:

SHOW US HOW IT IS DONE!

Roll up your sleeves and show us doomers how to build anything even remotely resembling a self sustaining “renewable” energy system using “renewable” energy alone.

Wait, don’t bother, we already know the answer: It can’t be done. Not at any scale.

What then is the answer? Why it’s so obvious anyone can see it. It’s staring us right in the face for anyone who bothers to look.

The evidence is everywhere you look, all over the world, evidence can be found of Human societies that have lived “sustainably” for thousands of years by harvesting their food, fuel, and fibers from the surrounding forests at a rate which can be easily replaced by new growth of both flora and fauna.

Anything more than that is doomed to eventually fail at the point when burning up accumulated capital can no longer meet demand.

Evidence for that fact is can also be found all over the world in the form of the many collapsed civilizations throughout history.

Ours is no different.

Arthur on Sun, 11th Aug 2013 5:44 pm 



DC, there is no necessity of having to choose from both extremes: a) an almost complete egalitarian USSR, where everybody was state property and had an almost equal pay (namely almost nothing), which ended in complete parallysis of society or b) an insane inegalitarian income distribution like in the US of today. Sure I am in favor of garanteed minimum income, as well as limitation of excessive incomes and financial assets (billionairs should not be allowed to exist, say 20 million is enough). But once a society orders that garbagemen and heart surgeons should receive equal pay, as the author Tom Wayburn seems to advocate, you recreate the conditions of the USSR.

“he old SU is your favorite whipping boy”

I wonder if you have any real idea about what an absolute horror this red terror state represented. But hey, there were no kings and it was progressive and egalitarian and all, so naturally most North-Americans, whose ancestors abandoned their European mother civilization, until today instinctively choose the side of the commies. Heck, without Wallstreet and the rest of the US elite there would not have been a USSR. The US supported the USSR from the early beginnings until after the war Stalin and Gromyko said consistently ‘njet’ against the US proposed NWO world state under UN auspices. So in the end the world’s largest criminal Stalin was good for something after all when he eliminated Washington’s man Trotsky with an ice pick, became Wasington’s adversary and involuntarily prevented US NWO designs from happening. Today Washington will find Russia, China, EU and Islam on it’s way, so the NWO is dead in the water.

“As this gas will be burned in any event, it should be used here to create future livable conditions.”

The sun will be around for another 2 billion years, fossil fuel for another few decades. From these two simple facts it should be freaking obvious to anyone that the last barrels of fossil fuel, fracked or otherwise, should be used to set up an alternative energy system based on solar (wind=solar) NOW, regardless of how many eroei points an alternative energy source has on offer. The longer we wait, the deeper the dip is going to be. But in the end there is no energy problem, there is an infinite amount of energy available. In order to exploit that energy hard choices have to be made now and as Heinberg says, we have to abandon fossil before it abandons us.

Unless of course we are cynical and say: let the world undergo a major energy and hence a population crunch. Anyone want to advocate that?

Mike Della on Sun, 11th Aug 2013 8:49 pm 



Renewable energy may do a lot of the average home’s bottomline. Electricity bills are out of control. I know some families who pay $200-$300 per month during the summer months. This digs into the amount of money people can pay towards lowering their debt.

shortonoil on Sun, 11th Aug 2013 10:05 pm 



The author apparently hasn’t been around that long. ERoEI is a term that came into use around 2003. Previously the term used was EROI. ERoEI refers to energy returned on energy invested, and applies specifically to petroleum. More specifically to the ratio at the well head. ERoEI = Eg/Ep, where Eg is the energy in a unit of oil (barrel, or gallon) and Ep is the work input at the well head to extract the oil. It came into use to prevent confusion when discussing energy return in general, since EROI can be used for anything.

Gail’s estimate of 5:1 for a necessary EROI to drive contemporary society isn’t far off. The petroleum production system reaches its “dead state” at an ERoEI of 6.9:1. The dead state is the theoretical point where no additional work can be extracted from a quantity of petroleum. It is calculated by exergy analysis, or sometimes called availability analysis. Whether or not alternatives can replace petroleum is still up in the air. No one, that I know of, has done a definitive study of the matter. Most of what is in the literature can be boiled down to a bunch of conjecture. What I can tell you is that of 2012 the average ERoEI of conventional crude was 9.6:1. It seems doubtful that there is any other energy source available today that can beat that figure.

Arthur on Mon, 12th Aug 2013 9:40 am 



“What I can tell you is that of 2012 the average ERoEI of conventional crude was 9.6:1. It seems doubtful that there is any other energy source available today that can beat that figure.”

http://deepresource.wordpress.com/2013/06/29/eroei-of-photovoltaics/

Here a ranking of eroei of different energy sources:

carbonbrief . org / blog / 2013 / 03 /energy-return-on-investment-which-fuels-win

hydro 40+
wind 20
coal 18
natgas 7
solar 6
nuclear 5

(according to Scientific American, with comments)

BillT on Mon, 12th Aug 2013 12:56 pm 



Arthur, try to manufacture any one of those top two without oil and see what happens. Ditto for the bottom two.

Arthur on Mon, 12th Aug 2013 5:14 pm 



Machines that produce solar cells are not powered by coal, nor gas, nor oil, nor pedals, nor sails, nor donkeys, just electricity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ1SC-vUe_I

GregT on Mon, 12th Aug 2013 8:57 pm 



Solar panels are merely collectors of energy, one very small part in an immensely complicated plethora of systems. One does not merely plop a solar panel on the ground and carry on with BAU.

What exactly are you planning on using solar energy for Arthur? Light bulbs, computers, and even refrigerators, are not necessary for human survival. Food and water are.

The further we damage the earths ecosystems, the less food and water that will be available to keep our species alive. We are already in overshoot, mainly because of cheap, abundant, excess energy. Why would anyone wish to continue down the same path that we are currently on? The only thing that we will accomplish is to lessen the carrying capacity of the Earth even more than we already have.

We need to seriously rethink the direction that we are heading in, because the direction that we are heading in now, leads to a dead end.

Arthur on Tue, 13th Aug 2013 5:44 pm 



“What exactly are you planning on using solar energy for Arthur? Light bulbs, computers, and even refrigerators, are not necessary for human survival. Food and water are. ”

I am confident that life in the future in Europe will provide for more than naked survival. Do not expect much change, probably slow decline, holiday in Holland rather than Maldives, cycling more, never buying a desktop or laptop anymore, at some point dumping the very old car without replacement. That sort of stuff.