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ERoEI is unimportant and is being used incorrectly
In this article I will show that ERoEI is almost totally unimportant by itself. It does not matter if ERoEI is increasing or decreasing. ERoEI provides no guidance about which sources of energy we should pursue, nor does it offer any guidance about how much net energy will be available to us in the future. By itself, ERoEI is a useless figure. Although different sources of energy (such as coal or solar PV) have different ERoEI ratios, this means nothing important.
What is important to civilization (and to us) is the amount of net energy obtained from a source of energy, not its ERoEI. The two are not the same. It is the amount of net energy which determines how much we can drive, whether we can take long airplane trips, and so on.
Unfortunately, the amount of net energy from a source cannot be determined from its ERoEI. ERoEI is a ratio, so it contains no information about the amount of energy invested or returned. As a result, ERoEI cannot be used by itself to determine how much net energy will be produced by any type of energy (such as coal).
The equation for determining net energy would be as follows, given ERoEI and an energy investment:
energy_net = (1-1/ERoEI) * energy_investment
You will notice that it’s IMPOSSIBLE to solve this equation without knowing what the energy investment is. As a result, it’s impossible to calculate net energy returned from any type of energy (for example, coal) by knowing its ERoEI alone. As a result, ERoEI is a useless figure by itself and cannot be used to determine the amount of net energy which could be obtained from any type of energy, and it’s the amount of net energy which is important, not ERoEI.
Let me provide a more concrete example. Suppose you have a solar PV panel with an ERoEI of 2 which returns 1KW on average continuously for 30 years. In that case, the net energy provided by that solar panel is 131.4 MWh ((1*24*365*30)/2) over its lifetime. If, however you have 10 such solar panels, then the net energy returned is 1314 MWh—ten times the amount of net energy returned, despite no change in ERoEI. In this obvious case, ERoEI has NO CORRELATION with the AMOUNT of net energy obtained.
As another example, assume two kinds of solar panels. One kind of solar panels has a very low ERoEI of 2, and another kind has a very high ERoEI of 1,000. However, the solar panels with the very low ERoEI require 1/1,000,000th the labor to construct, and labor is the scarce factor determining how many we can build. They are identical in all other regards. In this case, it can be shown that the low-ERoEI type of solar panels will obtain over 500,000 times more NET energy despite a 99.8% reduction in ERoEI. (The total net energy returned by 1,000,000 low-ERoEI solar panels will be 500,000, whereas the total net energy returned by the 1 high-ERoEI solar panel will be 0.999). Again, there is no correlation between ERoEI and net energy obtained.
As a result, the ERoEI of solar panels is useless information by itself. You must also know HOW MANY solar panels (or windmills, etc) there are (or will be), to determine the net energy available to civilization. ERoEI cannot tell you that.
For the most part, the net energy obtained from solar power would be determined by the number of solar panels built, not by their ERoEI. In turn, the number of solar panels which can be built, is determined by non-energy factors like capital and labor, because those are the scarce factors which prevent the construction of more solar panels. This point is complicated and requires further elaboration, so I will discuss it in a subsequent article. Suffice it to say, that the net energy of solar power is determined by non-energy factors such as capital and labor, and has almost no relation to ERoEI, because the number of solar panels built is determined by the scarce factors such as capital and labor.
Generally speaking, the amount of net energy goes up as ERoEI declines, although it’s a weak correlation. This is because the amount of gross energy is vastly higher at lower ERoEI ratios, and the greater amount of gross energy more than compensates for any decline in ERoEI. For example, it’s commonly claimed that crude oil had an ERoEI of 100 in 1930, but only has an ERoEI of 15 now. I seriously doubt that, but I’ll assume it’s true for the moment. From those figures, we can show that a decline in ERoEI led to a large increase in net energy. If oil had an ERoEI of 100 in 1930, and 5 million bbls per day were extracted back then (source: ), then the total amount of net energy per day from oil in 1930 was 4.95 million bbls of oil. On the other hand, if oil has an ERoEI of only 15 now, and we extract 90 million bbs per day, the total net energy from oil per day is now 83.99 million barrels. The amount of net energy from oil is 17 times higher today than in 1930 despite an 85% decline in ERoEI. This is frequently the case; more NET energy is frequently available at lower ERoEI ratios, because the amount is so much greater that ERoEI makes little difference.
In general, renewable sources of power can provide vastly greater net energy regardless of their ERoEI. This is because they are available in far greater amounts, by a degree which totally erases the importance of ERoEI. For example, what is the maximum amount of net energy which could be provided by solar power? The ERoEI is not important except as an intermediate figure when calculating the amount of NET energy.
The Earth is bombarded by 23,000 terawatt-years/year of solar radiation. Let’s assume that only 1% of this could ever be captured by solar PV panels. Also assume the panels have an extremely low ERoEI of 4. In that case, the amount of NET energy which is available from solar PV is 172.5 terawatt-years/year, which is more than 10x worldwide energy consumption at present (more than 30x if you apply an energy quality correction). As a result, the amount of net energy possible is vastly greater from solar power than from fossil fuels, EVEN IF the ERoEI of solar were very low. The reason we don’t obtain that much net energy from solar panels is because we don’t have enough NON-energy resources such as labor and capital to build that many solar panels. It has nothing to do with ERoEI. Even if the ERoEI of solar PV increased to infinity, it would make little difference to the amount of net energy obtained.
Again: net energy available is a function of BOTH EROEI AND AMOUNT. Either one of them by itself cannot be used to calculate net energy. If we wish to use a “rule of thumb”, then we should assume that MORE net energy is available at lower ERoEI ratios, but the correlation is so weak that it can’t be relied upon.
Unfortunately, ERoEI theorists do not realize any of this. Over and over again, they assume that ERoEI is somehow proportional to net energy. They assume that a higher ERoEI somehow implies more net energy. This is a severe mathematical error, but it’s repeated endlessly throughout the ERoEI literature.
Let me provide some examples which I read just a few days ago:
“Look [at a] Cheetah… That beautiful and ultra efficient machine, needs an EROI of about 3:1 (sped three times less energy running for the prey, that the energy contained in the prey it is going to eat). That’s a metabolic minimum EROI for mammals.Being the minimum EROI for any live being (mammals in particular) 2-3:1 in average, to be kept alive as species and for the couple to successfully breed their offspring (minimum of 2-3 per couple), probably Charles Hall is very right to state that a minimum EROI of 5:1 is required to have a minimum (very primitive and elemental) of civilization, beyond us living as naked apes.”
No, because that is confusing an ERoEI with an AMOUNT of net energy. Dr Hall observes that civilization requires more net energy than just the metabolism of its inhabitants require. Then he wrongly concludes that a higher ERoEI means more net energy. That is a basic mathematical error; frequently, using a lower ERoEI source of energy will obtain more net energy than a higher ERoEI one.
The Cheetah example is also mistaken in other ways. The Cheetah doesn’t just have a low ERoEI; it also has TOO FEW prey which it can consume. If the Cheetah could eat prey every 5 minutes, then it would have a vast excess of energy even at an ERoEI of 1.5. The problem is that many animals eat only once per day and some animals (such as crocodiles) eat only once per week or so. If they eat only 10,000 kilocalories per week, then increasing the ERoEI wouldn’t matter much (even increasing ERoEI to infinity in this case would only gain the animal another 3,300 kilocalories). What would help is to catch MORE prey.
“We can take our ERoEI 20 FF and invest them in ERoEI 50 sources and make a huge energy profit. Or we can invest them in <5 and make a loss. Our policy makers have lost their heads electing to promote loss making activities.”
No, because that is confusing ERoEI with an AMOUNT of net energy. If an ERoEI were an amount, then spending fossil fuels with ERoEI 20 on solar panels with ERoEI 5, would imply a loss of 15. However, you cannot subtract the ERoEIs of different sources of energy, because they are not AMOUNTS which can subtracted.
If you take ERoEI 20 fossil fuels, and invest them in ERoEI 5 solar PV, then the aggregate ERoEI is 100 (invest 1 unit of fossil fuels initially, obtain 20 units of fossil fuels with ERoEI of 20 thereby, invest each of those 20 units in solar panels with ERoEI 5, then obtain 100 units at the end of it for an initial investment of 1).
“IMO, the only thing that could delay the bad impacts of declining high ERoEI FF is to introduce to the global energy mix an energy source that has higher ERoEI than the fuels they have to replace.Introducing low ERoEI energy sources simply makes things worse.”
No, because (again) that is confusing ERoEI with an AMOUNT of net energy. The “bad impacts” are caused by TOO LITTLE net energy, not a low ERoEI. Adding any source of energy with an ERoEI higher than 1 increases the total amount of net energy available. Only an ERoEI lower than 1 would make things worse. If the source of energy is cheaper per unit of net energy (as solar power actually is) then it is easier to obtain more net energy that way, regardless of its ERoEI.
…All three of the above quotations are taken from leading figures in the ERoEI literature. Granted, the ERoEI movement is a tiny fringe movement, but these people are among the leading figures of it. Over and over again, they wrongly assume that ERoEI and net energy are somehow proportional, and that higher ERoEI implies more net energy. That is a basic mathematical error. Frequently, the opposite is the case.
What matters is the AMOUNT of net energy available to civilization, and that amount is far higher for renewables than for any other source, regardless of ERoEI.
65 Comments on "ERoEI is unimportant and is being used incorrectly"
makati1 on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 8:14 am
More happy bullshit for the techie dreamers to eat up.
shortonoil on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 8:35 am
” Unfortunately, the amount of net energy from a source cannot be determined from its ERoEI. “
Energy Returned/ Energy Invested = ERoEI
If one knows two of the above variables the third can be found. That is eighth grade algebra.
That is:
Energy Returned/ ERoEI = Energy Invested.
Also, ERoEI refers to Energy Returned on Energy invested at the well head (it is used exclusively for petroleum). Coal mines don’t have well heads. That should be EROI. EROI is a place and time dependent variable. The EROI is difference at the well head, than it is at the refinery exit gate, than it is at the consumer’s gas tank. It also declines with time.
ERoEI was coined by your yours truly in a 2004 report, and there is a synopsis of that report here on PO News. It was coined to prevent the confusion that arose from using EROI at different places in the production cycle, and then attempting to equate them.
BW Hill
http://www.thehillsgroup.org/
Davy on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 9:13 am
Wow, short, didn’t realize you coined the term. Good work. I am still pissed about that friggen plank you have us walking. Can’t I have 5 more years?!
joe on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 9:54 am
Would have thought energy returned on energy invested was very important. Ever tried to push your car 20 miles home? Hmm, i dont suppose i could pay 3 bucks to 10 guys to push it for me could I?
Oh well, i guess i could, afterall ERoEI is not important.
Lets look at it another way. If America had to go itself, and get Saudi oil itself and protect the oil itself and keep down the Shia Arabs of Arabia itself. Well, that would increase the EROEI too. It would sure make solar allot more attractive.
But I digress, afterall ERoEI is not important, right?
Jon on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 9:57 am
As the EROEI decreases wouldn’t the infrustructure for energy production increase? What happens when a higher percentage of GDP needs to be devoted to energy? Less is availabe for everything else, food production, municiple, schools, war machine, etc. What happens when 80% of the population works in some form of energy extraction? Can the remaining 20% sustain the whole population’s needs?
Jon.
shortonoil on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 10:50 am
“As the EROEI decreases wouldn’t the infrustructure for energy production increase? “
What really happens is that over time there is a small increase in the energy needed to extract oil. That small increase occurs because wells get deeper, and the water cut increases. More water has to be lifted, and it has to be lifted higher to get the same amount of oil.
To provide the extra energy needed to extract the oil, the oil must be processed into finished fuels. That takes a lot of energy; so a small increase in extraction energy gets magnified into a large decline in the energy that is available to the end user. That ratio is 4.9:1.
Here is a page that we put up to help explain what is happening:
http://www.thehillsgroup.org/depletion2_019.htm
We are kind of like a gerbil running a wheel that winds up a spring. Every step just doesn’t get harder – it gets 4.9 times as hard.
“Can’t I have 5 more years?! “
That will depend on the efficiency of the cannibalization process now taking place. We are now consuming our assets to produce petroleum; we see this primarily in the extraction of reserves which are then not being replaced. That is the low hanging fruit.
When we get to turning Hildaberg’s $5000 per pair orange loafers into oil production; things are going to start getting a little more difficult. Plan for the worse – hope for the best.
penury on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 12:11 pm
More MSM fakery, never tell the people the truth if the truth might “scare” people. Hide everything behind incomprehensible BS (at least to the average innummerate)to the average reader. Promise them unicorns and flying skittles, there’s an election in Nov.
rockman on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 12:30 pm
Well done shorty. And perhaps the Rockman gets credit for $RO$I: dollars returned on dollars invested. After all $RO$I is what drilling decisions are based upon…not EROEI. Didn’t notice anyone coining such an acronym prior to the Rockman.
An interesting side note: folks assume the EROEI is always decreasing for oil drilling projects for both conventional and uncon. But with lower oil prices and not so much lower drilling costs a project today has to recover more oil today then 3 years ago to pass economic muster. IOW the EROEI of oil projects drilled today will be higher then when oil was selling for $90+/bbl.
Boat on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 12:48 pm
rock/ape,
Oil porn.
Eight years ago, it took Continental Resources (CLR) and its service companies over a month to drill to the bottom of a well in the Bakken shale play. A year ago, it took 18-20 days, and it looked like that was the technical limit on how fast a well could be drilled.
Wrong.
Wells can now be drilled in 13-15 days thanks to improved sensors that keep drillers in the optimal drilling zone, more effective drill bits that can power though the Bakken’s hard rock, and other advances.
Wells can now be drilled in 13-15 days thanks to improved sensors that keep drillers in the optimal drilling zone, more effective drill bits that can power though the Bakken’s hard rock, and other advances.
The number of oil rigs operating in the U.S., despite recent increases, could stay depressed for years. But don’t let that fool you. New technology and techniques are unlocking more oil per well. While OPEC has succeeded in forcing U.S. producers to cut back, the industry that is emerging from the oil bust has found ways to pump oil faster and more cheaply, making it a tougher adversary for the next global standoff.
Another technique that has gained popularity in U.S. plays is pad drilling, or drilling several wells from a single location to reduce the time and money spent disassembling the rig and moving it to another spot. Improving drilling time is a priority for shale drillers, as each additional drilling day can cost thousands of dollars.
Meanwhile, the rigs themselves have also become more advanced. Helmerich & Payne (HP) pioneered the alternating current (AC) rig for shale back in the early 2000s. The rig’s ability to drill at various speeds improves precision and energy efficiency vs. direct current (DC) rigs.
Newer versions of the AC rig reduce “spud to spud time” — or the time it takes between starting a new well to moving to another well — to 7-10 days from 3-4 weeks, according to Marietta. That While good for oil producers, that also means suppliers of drilling products and services will see lower spending revenue and employment because fewer rigs are needed.
To be sure, new technologies and techniques don’t all deliver immediate, upfront savings, and finding the right technique for each reservoir can be time-consuming and expensive.
The oil business remains capital intensive, and capital has been in short supply for some companies. Breitburn Energy Partners, SandRidge Energy, Magnum Hunter Resources, Energy XXI, Goodrich Petroleum and others haven’t been able to survive lower oil prices and filed for bankruptcy protection.
But for those with strong balance sheets, the new techniques can, over decades, boost the estimated total recovery for a well, as more oil is recovered for longer.
“We are leaving behind 80% of oil in place, even with the best technology we have today,” Continental’s Henry said. “So we’ll continue to be surprised at the improvements that can be made.”
Apneaman on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 1:02 pm
Boat, I’m sure you know best given your decades of experience in the field eh?
shortonoil on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 1:23 pm
“So we’ll continue to be surprised at the improvements that can be made.”
If it takes 20K BTU per gallon to get it out of the ground, you have 42K (out of the original 140K) left over for the end user. Guess you missed that part!
If you think that the economy can afford to pay $100 for 1.7 million BTU, you must be smoking those weeds in your garden again?
Here is the post where I first mentioned ERoEI. This post was in 2008, the paper is dated 2004.
http://peakoil.com/forums/available-energy-t39163.html?hilit=available%20energy
Don Stewart on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 1:25 pm
Let’s do a thought experiment and then look at an example from biology to try to make things clear.
Suppose that 85 percent of the population are farmers who also build their own infrastructure with materials which are taken from their own property. They buy very little in town. Of the 15 percent, about 10 of those are engaged in ‘town occupations’, but they do not grow food. The remaining 5 of the 15 percent are the nobility…basically just a drag on society, but they have also made some pretty good laws regulating things like forestry, water, and sewage. We would be talking about Edo, Japan.
So long as the farmers have a positive energy return on the food they grow and are able to provide 95 percent of what they need, then a low energy return ratio on their food is not a big deal in normal years. If the rural society can generate 1.5 calories for every calorie they expend in work, everything is likely to function pretty well. Things will go bad in famine years, when calorie production sinks, and there is likely to be malnutrition and disease. The low energy return ratio is OK because each farmer is supporting only a fraction of a person in town or in the nobility.
However, if 2 percent of the people are engaged in actual food production, and if these same 2 percent buy most of what they consume in town (even including their own food), then the EROI requirement is very much higher. It would take us too far afield to get into how high the EROI has to be depending on the nature of the society. But I believe that the recent disagreement between Ugo Bardi and Charles Hall turned on this very point. Hall used a figure for ‘extended EROI’ of about 2 or 3 to 1 for PV, which accounted for the high cost of the society which is generating the money which goes to pay for the energy production. Bardi objects that Hall is mixing apples and oranges, and the energy process should not be charged with the high cost of the society.
From my perspective, both numbers are useful. We can imagine that agriculture is supposed to feed New York City and Mumbai and Toyo, or we can imagine that those cities basically disappear and people either starve or move back to the countryside to make their livings. The important thing is that we have a loop in our minds which connects the low EROI with a much simpler society.
Which brings me around to Nick Lane’s book The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life. I’m certainly not going to try to cover everything in the book…because I am not a biochemist and space on this blog is limited…not to speak of your attention span.
However, on page 238 and following, Lane discusses in some detail the fact that a cell contains both a mitochondria (which produces energy) and a cell proper. ‘the mitochondrial and the nuclear, and these had better be a match made in heaven.’ ‘The old idea that mitochondria are still independent of their host cells is therefore nonsense. Their ostensible autonomy–they give an eerie impression of replicating themselves whenever they feel like it–is a mirage. The fact is that their function depends on two distinct genomes. They can only grow or function if they are wholly provisioned with proteins encoded by both of these genomes.’
Lane goes on in great depth in a discussion of the angstrom level precision of the electron transfer mechanisms, the fact that mitochondrial genes mutate much more rapidly than nuclear genes, the fact of oxidization residues and so forth. He concludes ‘It’s hard to imagine a more preposterous arrangement for a process so central to all living things–respiration, the vital force!’.
I suggest that you simply think about the parallels between the mitochondrial function and the cell proper as compared to the energy industry which powers industrial society and the society itself. Neither is independent of the other. The society and the energy industry are intertwined just as the mitochondria and the nuclear material are intertwined in a biological cell.
Therefore, I think Bardi is wrong and Hall is right. If I understand the Etp model correctly, it is also right. Naive supply and demand curves are wrong. I am not claiming that either Hall or the Etp model are reliable in terms of their calculations…although I’m not challenging their calculations either. I am simply pointing out that narrow definitions of EROI which fail to take into account how the society works are not reliable indicators of what will happen if EROI is falling.
As for preposterous arrangements, I submit that using oil to move a 2 ton vehicle which moves one 150 pound human on expensive highways is probably on a par with the kludge which is our cells. We should not feel superior to Nature.
Don Stewart
GregT on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 1:37 pm
Boat,
When you use somebody else’s work the correct thing to do is to use quotation marks. Failing to do so can be considered to be plagiarism. An act of fraud.
It is also helpful to provide links to the original work so others can put it into context. I have taken the liberty of doing that for you here:
http://www.investors.com/news/boom-or-bust-u-s-oil-patch-finds-new-breakthroughs/
marmico on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 2:00 pm
If it takes 20K BTU per gallon to get it out of the ground, you have 42K (out of the original 140K) left over for the end user. Guess you missed that part!
What a crock of shit espoused by the ETP fuctard, with a hand clap from the equally useless PODMAN.
The net energy in the gasoline tank is greater in 2016 than it was 50 years ago.
The reason: petroleum extraction energy efficiency declined by a lesser amount than transportation energy efficiency from the well to the refinery rose, the refining and processing energy efficiency rose and distribution energy efficiency to the gasoline station rose.
Truth Has A Liberal Bias on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 2:32 pm
If it takes one million and one barrels of oil to go and get one million barrels of oil then that oil will not be gotten. It doesn’t matter if oil is $10/barrel or $100/barrel.
https://youtu.be/ztgz-QOOrs8
Where things become obscure is if it takes more than a million barrel equivalents of natural gas to go and get one million barrels of oil.
Don Stewart on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 2:58 pm
‘If it takes one million and one…’
That is not precisely true. To understand why, we can look at agriculture. It takes 10 calories of fossil fuels to produce one calorie of food on the table. Yet we still produce food. We can do so because we have had abundant fossil fuels to subsidize the food.
If food once again becomes our primary source of transport energy and energy to maintain our bodies (which can be about half and half in a hardworking society), then it becomes extremely important that food have a positive ratio of outs to ins.
In theory, if we had a fusion society with energy ‘too cheap to meter’, then we could continue to produce oil for its unique chemical gifts, simply subsidizing it with the abundant fusion energy…similar to the way we subsidize food production today.
However, since all fossil fuels are now becoming scarce, the realistic scenario has to be that oil pays for itself as an energy source. Should we figure out fusion or harnessing the neighborhood black hole or finding the key to dark energy, then things might change.
Don Stewart
Outcast_Searcher on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 3:32 pm
Nice piece. The basic premise makes much more sense than “we’re all doomed because ERoEI is decreasing”.
Don’t expect any reasonable response from the hard core doomer crowd. Any message that doesn’t portend short term collapse tends to be very badly received.
And being wrong year after year doesn’t bring a change in awareness for the vast majority of them.
shortonoil on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 4:28 pm
“Bardi objects that Hall is mixing apples and oranges, and the energy process should not be charged with the high cost of the society.”
Several years ago, while completely the Etp Model, we reached a conundrum. There appeared to be a lot of energy used that did not appear in the processing parts of petroleum production. It turns out that it is energy that must be consumed by the society for the petroleum production process to operate. As an example, the industry’s employees must be educated to a specific level to be functional, the process needs roads to be able to function, harbors have to be maintained, a level of military protection is needed to ensure continuous operations, legislative services, and regulatory services are needed to prevent havoc, and etc. and etc. All in all there is a lot of energy that must be used which never appears on the producers books. For oil to act as an energy source that energy cost must be taken into account, without its expenditure there won’t be any petroleum production. Hall has estimated that a modern society needs an energy source with a minimum EROI of 7:1 to function. The Etp Model indicates that the “dead state” for petroleum is at 6.9:1.
In this specific case Hall is definitely right, but that in no way compromises the excellent work that Bardi has already accomplished.
shortonoil on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 4:35 pm
“I have taken the liberty of doing that for you here: “
Thanks Greg!
yoananda on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 5:22 pm
ERoEI without timescale is meaningless.
Don Stewart on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 5:53 pm
BW Hill and Others Interested
Here is Robert Ayres estimate of Second Law efficiencies. See the table pretty far down in the scroll. He estimates transport at .01 efficiency…well below any other category.
Don Stewart
Don Stewart on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 5:54 pm
Sorry..here is link
https://ruayres.wordpress.com/2016/02/19/what-is-exernomics/#more-443
Don Stewart
shortonoil on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 6:42 pm
Thanks for the link Don,
But I must admit that some of his numbers look a little funny. We calculate that the efficiency of petroleum production is 20.45%. If it was much lower than that the oil age would have already ended.
I’ll drop Dr. Ayres a note, and see what he says.
http://www.thehillsgroup.org/
Don Stewart on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 7:04 pm
BW Hill
I knew nothing about him until a National Geographic reporter mentioned his name in an article I was reading.
The way I look at what he may be saying:
*Calculate the efficiency with which oil can move a 150 pound human 10 miles.
A human might burn 200 dietary calories to walk 10 miles. But a transportation system plus oil production system plus road system is going to spend an enormous amount of calories to move the human 10 miles. So the efficiency of the oil based transportation system is very, very low.
Things look better if one is hauling gravel in a truck. But I still wouldn’t be surprised if the ratio is pretty low.
I believe the Ellen Macarthur Foundation came up with some numbers for auto transport in Europe which were in the neighborhood of 1 percent efficiency. I can try to find that, if you are interested. They were looking at the ‘work performed’, e.g., moving a 150 pound person across the landscape.
The thing that intrigues me is that if transport is so inefficient, then the whole thing can be tipped into a losing proposition by just a modest degradation in the quality of the oil.
Don Stewart
rockman on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 7:45 pm
Boat – Actually good numbers you have there. But your timing is a tad off: they got the drillmtime to under 15 days a few years ago…before the pricerpricer collapse.
“Newer versions of the AC rig reduce “spud to spud time” — or the time it takes between starting a new well to moving to another well — to 7-10 days from 3-4 weeks, according to Marietta.” I don’t know who Marietta but obviously they’ve never see a f*cking rig mobed from one location to another. LOL. I’ve seen the process done more the a hundred times in my 41 years. A pusher would get his ass run off if he took weeks to move a rig…even if it had to move a hundred miles (not a common distance). And I’m not talking a few years ago but decades ago. The basic rig compartmentalization hasn’t changed for many decades. Typically a big shale rig moves in 20 to 24 18-wheeler loads. More like 4 to 5 days. And the 2 to 3 day to rig up. And while p rates (penetration rates) improved significantly after the first two years or so the laterals went from 1,000′ to 1,500′ in the early days to 5,000’+. Better p rates weren’t enough to completely offset the longer holes.
3 to 4 weeks…LMFAO. About 8 years ago I had a Deep Water semi rig mobed from the African coast across the Atlantic Ocean to Brazil in about 3 weeks. But expensive: the day the rig arrived on location the cumulative cost for that well was already $54 million…the operators pay for a rig while being mobed…why we get it donedrilling as possible. BTW and then Dervon spent another $150 million drilling that DRY HOLE. The hot Brazil play was in Deep Water but the wells themselves weren’t drilled very deep.
Don Stewart on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 7:50 pm
BW Hill
This isn’t the Ellen Macarthur stuff I was thinking of, but it is indicative:
The core challenge is the waste embedded in the transport system. The European car is parked (often on expensive inner-city land) 92 percent of the time. When the car
is used, only 1.5 of its 5 seats are occupied. Although energy conversion cannot reach 100 percent due to the Carnot cycle, less than 20 percent of petrol propels the wheels. With a deadweight ratio around 12:1, only 1–2 percent of the energy moves people.
As much as 50 percent of inner-city land is devoted to mobility (roads and parking); but, even at rush hour, cars occupy only 10 percent of the average European road. Congestion cost approaches 2 percent of GDP in cities like Stuttgart and Paris.
From:
https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/assets/downloads/publications/EllenMacArthurFoundation_Growth-Within_July15.pdf
If you are interested, they also develop the fact that only 5 percent of the applied agricultural fertilizer is actually used as nutrition for a human body. So they take a very broad look. They do not stop with a calculation of how efficiently a fertilizer plant can operate.
Don Stewart
Boat on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 8:06 pm
rockman,
Thanks for the input.
Apneaman on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 8:25 pm
Just like Alberta
Texas facing massive well cleanup costs after oil bust
http://www.dallasnews.com/business/headlines/20160619-texasfacing-massive-well-cleanup-costs-after-oil-bust.ece
Shouldn’t this be added to the EROEI calculations?
Truth Has A Liberal Bias on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 9:48 pm
@ Don- If it takes 101 barrels to go get 100 barrels you don’t go get the 100 you keep your 101. It’s basic fucking logic you fucking retard. If you have a 101 barrels and you think it’s a good idea to burn it in order to get 100 and you believe food production is the basis of argument for that choice you’re a god damn fucking retard.
Truth Has A Liberal Bias on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 10:46 pm
@short
I’ve read your bullshit energy model. It’s the most retarded fucking piece of garbage I’ve read in a long long time. Considering you don’t understand the difference between value cost and price it’s no surprise that you came up with such a retarded idea. The only people that take you seriously are fucking retards.
Sissyfuss on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 10:48 pm
Back to the article, if you’re getting 100 to 1 Eroei on 1930 oil for 2 billion people and you’re getting 15 to 1 Eroei on 2016 oil for 7.4 billion people, aren’t you screwed and tattooed?
makati1 on Sun, 19th Jun 2016 10:55 pm
Sissyfuss, and more. lol
Davy on Mon, 20th Jun 2016 5:32 am
Not True, your mastery of the English language is a good reflection on why the ETP model is beyond your understanding.
shortonoil on Mon, 20th Jun 2016 7:10 am
Don Stewart said:
” The core challenge is the waste embedded in the transport system. “
Some simple back of the envelope calculations indicate that is definitely true. If we assume that 75% of petroleum’s energy is used to drive transportation for 7.2 billion people, on a gross energy bases that is 47,775 BTU per day per person. A person consuming 2500 calories per day is inputting 9.92 BTU.
That is an overall efficiency of 0.0002%. Biological organisms are incredibly more efficient at using energy than are human built machines.
Maybe, Mother Nature is trying to tell us something?
shortonoil on Mon, 20th Jun 2016 7:37 am
” Not True, your mastery of the English language is a good reflection on why the ETP model is beyond your understanding. “
Through out history people have attempted to deride, belittle. and demonize what they do not, or can not understand. It is the most common form of fear driven response that humans employ. In today’s world where knowledge has become almost free if one wants to take the time and effort to absorb it, it breaks down to a matter of personal ambition. Where you are implying that a certain level of stupidity is being demonstrated, it is probably more likely a matter of stupidity, and general laziness.
Don Stewart on Mon, 20th Jun 2016 7:39 am
BW Hill
‘core challenges’
Decades ago my sister started working for Toyota. I became interested in cars. After puzzling about them for a while, I became convinced that choosing a car had a lot to do with how people thought they would feel if they owned the car. So, Toyota sells cars with the feature that ‘you don’t have to try to get your car keys out of your skinny jeans’…accomplished with some electronic magic connecting the key in your pocket or purse to the ignition switch.
I extrapolated my findings to everything else in the world and concluded that humans are really spending a hundred thousand BTUs per day (and much more in the United States) trying to manipulate some synapses in the brain.
Calculate that efficiency!!
My sister, who was part of the mechanical end of Toyota, was sure I was wrong…she just couldn’t explain where my mistake lay.
Don Stewart
Davy on Mon, 20th Jun 2016 8:44 am
The transport system is much deeper than embedded waste. It goes to the very core of our economic and social fabric. Calculating the inefficiencies of fossil fuel transport is important on one level but its relevancy diminishes due to the systematic nature of our way of life. The velocity of activity these inefficiencies create make up for the thermodynamic inefficiencies of the actual transport. Basically cars are who we are and the basics of transport support all other activities. This basis is not just in the developed countries it is globally because our food system is now global and industrial. Our financial networks are global. We have been able to justify such low efficiencies in fossil fuel transport because it has yielded an extremely productive adaptive growing system.
What is the core challenge now and a challenge already lost is the basis of this transport society is destructive and finite. We are reaching the limits of this car based culture. Diminishing returns are occurring across the board. Most all of our problems, challenges, and predicaments have come to us because of the car culture. The car culture allowed specialization within globalization. It allowed hyper adaptation at the expense of tried and true living arrangements. It allowed ecosystems to be inhabited that shouldn’t be. It allowed populations to treble beyond sustainability short term and longer term we are an order of magnitude into overshoot all because of the car culture. The sustainability and resilience of local based culture within a proper carrying capacity has been discarded almost everywhere. If it is still present it is within range of dangerous overshoot making that sustainable local vulnerable to generalized collapse.
The real core challenge of the transport system is finding a way to leave it and go back to localized living. The dead state of oil is going to take us there. The collapsing global economy is leading the way. Climate change will play its part by destroying social and economic stability. We will be in crisis when we see cars overturned and their wheels spinning in vain. When we see this picture we will be facing a die off never imagines when the first cars were being built innocently and with great pride in human achievement. This is the end game for so many challenges. The waste is a culture discarded for one with no future. The car culture was a classic and terrible species bubble and now that bubble is popping.
marmico on Mon, 20th Jun 2016 9:01 am
I told you fucking innumerates more than a year ago that the ETP algorithm doesn’t pass its own proof.
Now Tom S. who occasionally posts on this blog, has made a fundamental error. The quantity of energy supplied is independent of the net energy supply per unit of gross energy, i.e. EROI can decline or rise as the quantity of supply increases or decreases.
Take the shale oil bust in the U.S. The well head EROI of LTO has risen as the quantity supplied has declined. Drilling intensity is inversely related to EROI.
The refiners and processors are doing their usual energy intensity incremental improvements year by year.
Don Stewart on Mon, 20th Jun 2016 9:35 am
Davy
‘the very core of our economic and social fabric’
I agree almost across the board with what you say. There is probably no way to gently transition back to a world where transportation depended on humans walking, with some human powered canoes and simple sailing ships, and a little animal traction. We saw such a world as late as the 1850s in Edo, Japan. But I do not see a way for the global corporations which now dominate our means of production to make such a transition. For one thing, there simply weren’t any corporations in Edo. Which means that we are looking at the wholesale destruction of our means of production.
The alternative is sort of laid out in the book 150 Strong, which you will see referenced at Dmitry Orlov’s site. 150 well-chosen people CAN make a socially and economically coherent society, and can be genetically vigorous provided they establish breeding partner swaps with other groups of 150. But the prospects for getting to such groups are very poor, in my opinion.
I give the Ellen Macarthur Foundation credit for trying. But I’m not holding my breath.
Don Stewart
GregT on Mon, 20th Jun 2016 9:47 am
“I told you fucking innumerates more than a year ago that the ETP algorithm doesn’t pass its own proof.”
Like a smelly little fart, blowing in the wind.
Davy on Mon, 20th Jun 2016 10:46 am
Don, yea, hard to disagree with the dark future. We can extend our efforts by efficiency and lifestyle changes with the right cooperation and leadership. A part of me wonders if we should not just get this hellish event out of the way and hope for the best. Let’s have a die off and hope for the best for the sake of the earth.
In any case I am just opining acedemically. I am a humble goat farmer who is preparing for the worst and hoping for something less horrible. Nothing I can do matters in the big picture but I do matter to my family, friends, and local. It is there I live now. When I am here I am maintaining the script so I can guide my family, friends, and local when the time is right.
rockman on Mon, 20th Jun 2016 11:18 am
“Back to the article, if you’re getting 100 to 1 Eroei”. I’m not sure where such UNDOCUMENTED numbers come from and why they are blindly accepted. Is it because the big conventional onshore US fields discovered in the 40’s and early 50’s were so much bigger then ones discovered decades later. Take a real example: the field the Rockman is currently redeveloping with hz wells. The 1946 field produced 30 million bbls. Now compare that to a smaller field in the same trend developed 25 years later that produced only 5 million bbls. Obviously the EROEI of the older field is about 6X better: same depth, same amount of steel casing, same type of drill rig, etc Right?
Utter bullish*t. LOL. You don’t need to be a reservoir engineer to understand it took a lot more wells to produce 30 million bbls then 5 million bbls. How many more? Would you beleive about 6X as many. Well DA! LOL.
Guess what? Mother Earth doesn’t give a sh*t about EROEI. But she very much cares about RADIAL SWEEP. That’s the dynamic that dertermines how much oil can efficiently be produced out of a well bore. And in this REAL exasmple it doesn’t matter if the well was drilled in 1946 or 1986.
And here’s another tidbit to pop that bubble: drilling was more energy efficient in the 80′ then it was in the 40’s. Guess what else: the big NG cap on the 1946 discovery was flared because it wasn’t economical to lay the pipeline. But after the late 70’s such production became very valuable and was sold.
Bottom line: the EROEI of the more recent wells in this trend was much better then the older ones. Of course I’m not comparing those wells to, let’s say, the recent shale wells…apples to oranges.
So how about the vertical Eagle Ford drilled in the 40’s? Yes…that actually did happen but not a great many of them. So how would their EROEI’s (and those of other tite reservoirs developed back then) compare with recent hz wells? They would really suck. LOL. Yes: the hz wells take a lot more energy. But they also produce a hell of lot more oil. Those older wells might recover a few tens of thousands of bbls with the newer hz wells recovering in the hundreds of thousands of bbls.
And one more time: for Dog’s sake give up the bullish*t that those old fields were “easy”. They weren’t. It became much, much easier to find oil/NG fields from the 70’s on. What was very different was that the older onshorer US fields were bigger. But guess what else also increased the EROEI of those older trends: energy was used to drill a lot of dry holes back in the “good ole days”. LOL.
shortonoil on Mon, 20th Jun 2016 11:38 am
“But I do not see a way for the global corporations which now dominate our means of production to make such a transition. “
If we assume (let’s play economist for a while) that the integrated global production system can not function without the petroleum industry you are 100% correct. According to the Etp Model the petroleum industry is now losing $2.2 trillion per year. Most of that loss is now being created from the reserves that they are extracting, but can no longer replace. The industry is burning through its asset base at a horrendous rate, while still being able to maintain a positive cash flow.
That $2.2 trillion per year is manifesting itself in the underlying deflation that the Central Banks are now attempting to combat with their printing policies. Once the petroleum industries’ cash flow begins to go negative there will be no amounting of printing in the world that will be able to turn the tide. That is likely to be the world’s biggest “OH SHIT” day since the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
The industries’ cash flow will turn negative when they can no longer demand a high enough price for crude to cover their lifting cost. Unfortunately, we don’t know what the world wide average lifting cost is, but we do know that it is going up as the price of oil is going down. Once it is reached the debt based monetary system will collapse, and supply chains will shut down. The chances are very high that it will take most of the remaining fossil fuel industry with it.
As we have been saying the world is not going to gently slide down the back side of Hubbert’s Curve; we are going to hit a thermodynamic wall. A wall built from the most basic building blocks know to physics. I am posting this because those with no knowledge of our present situation will have almost no chance of survival after it occurs.
Sissyfuss on Mon, 20th Jun 2016 12:10 pm
I’m betting long on Short. And Rocko, your understanding of the oily business is nonpareil in MHO. But I see you as a Rocosaurus, an ancient beast staring into a Mesozoic sky wondering why there are two suns out today and why the hell one of them seems to be growing as if it were getting closer.
ellsworth on Mon, 20th Jun 2016 12:48 pm
My only understanding of the Etp model is from the 5 page intro on the hills group site, the graph on the second page is particularly interesting, I don’t know if this is a valid question, but what parameters would’ve made that green curve have a shallower slope, or shift it to the right? therefore; extending the decline of the oil age.
This is the graph I’m refering to: http://www.thehillsgroup.org/depletion2_020.htm
Jon on Mon, 20th Jun 2016 6:46 pm
I see a lot of good arguments here. That the older, ‘easier’ fields also suffered from more primitive technology and that newer fields are exploited more efficiently must be taken into consideration. How much energy does it take, on average, to take a barrel of oil from the ground and deliver it to the economy to do non energy related tasks? What’s available to pursue the human endeavour, in other words? That’s a metric that probably does not exist. All we can say is, if the economy is thriving, it must be less than one barrel. It’s never easy to compare apples to oranges since there is no conversion program or common denominator. Ultimately, life is theoretical. If the theories are corrent, then we are alive.
Having said that, just dismissing the concept of ERoEI as unimportant is unjustified. For instance. Suppose I were to find a casino where every time I put a quarter in a particular slot machine I got one thousand dollars back. It’s not always the same slot machime, and I may have to hunt about a bit before I find the sweet spot, but on average I can get 800 or 900 dollars for an hour of work. Not bad. I can spend an hour on Monday morning and have enough money to let me slide for the rest of the week doing other things.
Sweet. Now, after a while, and after I have altered my lifestyle to expect a paycheck of 800 dollars for one hour’s work, the payouts start to fluxuate. Maybe they go up for a while. Maybe they go down. Maybe I can’t always expect an 800 dollar payoff. Maybe only 600. Or maybe I have to spend more time, say all of Monday, to get enough to get me through the week. That’s rattling. Something I took for granted now requires, no demands, consideration. I have to spend more time thinking about casinos. There’s even talk about Quarters Returned on Quarters Invested and Peak Casino!
Maybe some casinos yield 400 dollars for one quarter but only once a day. Maybe some yield 10,000 dollars for one quarter but only once a year. Maybe some suck down quarters and give nothing. Eventually I have to settle for two hundred dollars for one quarter but have to work at it on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. That’s not enough to live on, so I have to come back on Thursdays too. Then Fridays. More time is spent at the casino and less doing things I like, which I can’t afford, anyway.
That’s doable as long as I continue to get the surplus I require to live. But what happens when the return is only one hundred dollars per quarter? Or 50? Or one? The house wins.
Jon.
Don Stewart on Mon, 20th Jun 2016 7:30 pm
‘lot of good arguments here’
I will leave it to my betters to debate about what the EROEI was back in the good old days. Instead, I would like for us to consider briefly a little more biology from Nick Lane’s The Vital Question.
Peter Mitchell, a contemporary of Crick and Watson at Cambridge, said this in 1957 at an ‘origins of life’ conference in Moscow:
‘I cannot consider the organism without its environment…From a formal point of view the two may be regarded as equivalent phases between which dynamic contact is maintained by the membranes that separate and link them.’
I don’t want to follow the details of Lane’s argument in this note. But I would like to appropriate his (really Mitchell’s) notion of the organism (oil production) and its environment (the larger social and economic sphere). So let’s take a quick look at the environment in which oil was being produced a hundred years ago. I was looking at the Obits in my old home town, and I saw one for a man who had lived in my home town as a child, then moved to Three Sands, Oklahoma at the age of 8. In the 1940s he moved to southern California to work in defense plants during the war, and then worked in the oil fields in California. He died at the age of 100, and his children and grandchildren paid to have his obituary printed back in Oklahoma, in the surviving town closest to Three Sands. So let’s take a look at Three Sands:
http://www.gazmuth.com/region/ghost-towns/three-sands.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpikOA1Ih94
There are some people in Oklahoma who specialize in these video tours of Oklahoma ghost towns. Some used to be agricultural centers, but many were oil towns. If you look carefully at the old pictures, you see an enormously human labor intensive effort to get at the oil. Yes, the oil is only a couple of thousand feet down, but nobody today could afford all that labor. My question to you: How could Three Sands and similar oil fields create the fortunes of the Marlands and the Rockefellers, while also supporting all those workers and the supporting players such as stores and schools and churches?
In these oil fields, you will see pictures of horses pulling wagons with oil field equipment. The workers lived in tents in the shadows of the drilling rigs. When the sweet spots moved a couple of miles, so did the town. In short, the environment in which the oil was produced was quite unlike the environment today. Company housing has, I think, virtually disappeared…except perhaps in hostile territory where protection is needed, and workers drive great distances to work in big pick-ups.
Is it possible to reconcile the belief of those who work in the oil patch in the notion of a century of improved production methods with the claim that EROEI is much lower than it used to be. Over the last century, we have steadily substituted fossil energy used as a fuel, or turned into capital equipment, to substitute for labor…both in the oil patch and in society at large. So a current oil patch worker will look at the pictures of the old boom towns and see a whole lot of ‘waste’ that would never be tolerated today. But what we mostly fail to see is the substitution of enormous amounts of energy for the labor which is no longer required.
If the labor is not busy in the oil patch, and all the farmers are now gone (as witness the agricultural ghost towns), how are people making a living? Well…a lot of them became, for example, lawyers. But Charles Hugh Smith tells us today that we have a surplus of lawyers and other highly educated people.
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjune16/law-schools6-16.html
It may be that the technology gods are now destroying humans rather than nourishing us.
Which brings us around to Mitchell and Lane’s reminder that we cannot look at an organism in isolation…we have to simultaneously look at the environment. Particularly, we have to look at the energy and dollar cost of producing oil in the world we have created, and we have to look at the value which society can create using the oil which the industry itself does not use. In other words, we have to solve two simultaneous equations. Looking at either equation in isolation will not tell us what we need to know.
Don Stewart
sunweb on Tue, 21st Jun 2016 9:24 pm
Well said Don. Technology is seductive and we bow down to it. We are slowly technogizing ourselves into extinction. Technology is seductive. Is it the power? Is it the comfort? Or is it some internal particularly human attribute that drives it? Technology surrounds us and becomes part of our story and myths. Technology tantalizes the human mind to make, combine, invent. There are always unintended consequences with technology. It effects how we experience the world in time and space. It affects how we feel the world. If all the externalities were included in the prices and cost to nature, we would be very, very wary of technology.
I think we have moved from technology in the service of religion (pyramids and gothic cathedrals) to religion and culture in the service of technology. It isn’t a deity that will save humanity but in the eyes of many – it will be technology.
We will do more of the same, business as usual until there are no more holes in the ground to dig, no more water above and below to contaminate, no humans to wage slave, no other lifeforms to eliminate. Yes, we are building Trojan horses in our hearts, minds and spirits. It will be elitist and entitlement and hubris – it will end with both a bang and a whimper.
http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-bang-and-whimper.html
sunweb on Tue, 21st Jun 2016 9:24 pm
Well said Don. Technology is seductive and we bow down to it. We are slowly technogizing ourselves into extinction. Technology is seductive. Is it the power? Is it the comfort? Or is it some internal particularly human attribute that drives it? Technology surrounds us and becomes part of our story and myths. Technology tantalizes the human mind to make, combine, invent. There are always unintended consequences with technology. It effects how we experience the world in time and space. It affects how we feel the world. If all the externalities were included in the prices and cost to nature, we would be very, very wary of technology.
I think we have moved from technology in the service of religion (pyramids and gothic cathedrals) to religion and culture in the service of technology. It isn’t a deity that will save humanity but in the eyes of many – it will be technology.
We will do more of the same, business as usual until there are no more holes in the ground to dig, no more water above and below to contaminate, no humans to wage slave, no other lifeforms to eliminate. Yes, we are building Trojan horses in our hearts, minds and spirits. It will be elitist and entitlement and hubris – it will end with both a bang and a whimper.
http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-bang-and-whimper.html
Davy on Wed, 22nd Jun 2016 6:08 am
Technology is not bad it is what humans have become with technology that has made technology destructive. We should be recognizing a congruous place in the earth ecosystem with a degree of harmony. This should be the basis of our culture where now a divisive technological trends are the basis. We don’t think technology is our god but everything about man today is embracing technology at the expense of who we are. We no longer know who we are. Money and power are just symptoms of this embrace. Small farmers in a harmonious relationship to their land are not in the position to have power and money like the elite with bankers and armies. Recognizing our fatal flaw and acknowledging it will be our undoing is of vital importance. This means rejecting the drive to be an elite and embracing the harmony of a farmer to the land. The point is not farming or being an elite it is the human connection which is manifested in all our occupations must change.
This conversion does not mean we should leave technology because we can’t. We are here and it will take a process to bring us back to a proper relationship to nature. That is if there will be a return. We may have destroyed the most important aspect of our humanity and that is our place in nature. We can’t leave technology as a people because it is now an adaptive self-organizing system of billions of choices utilizing billions of devices. It is like trying to get rid of ants they are too numerous to eradicate. The fact is further complicated because we need technology to leave technology.
Since we can’t leave technology but must what should we do? We should at least recognize this flaw of modern humans and end the narrative that technology is our savior. This is the biggest issue now among humans. We are in a situation of competitive cooperation. This is an incongruous juxtaposition and as such points to a tension of inconsistencies. We are driven to outcompete our neighbors with superior dispositions coupled with technology. We understand cooperation is in our best interest to accommodate this competitive human drive. War is the result of breakdown of cooperation. Technology is the basis of this drive. Technology is the game board of competition. It is a dilemma that to move away from technology makes one less competitive generally so we chose to add to it not subtract from it.
The reality is efficiency and the other results of technology have reached diminishing returns of limits of growth and ecological and social decay. We must breach that chasm for all of our collective survival. Competitive cooperation will continue so we must change the rules with a decline protocols. Our global social narrative must be embracing decline not competitive cooperation of a technological based development.
Of course this is not going to happen do you think I am stupid. The reality is at your individual and local level it can be done and should be done now as we approach the end time. This is a paradox of right is wrong and wrong is right. If you embrace this paradigm shift you will win. You will win because nature is on your side. This is so because decline is now the dominant macro trend within humans and nature. We are in an extinction phase and a global ecological cataclysm.
The best thing you can do now is collapse in place. Begin the process now. Practice relative sacrifice to get there. Downsize with dignity by embracing spiritual values instead of technological values. This is an orientation of the mind not a physical device you buy and adapt to. Drop under the radar screen. Quit your street fighting and go hide. If one wants to know a good spiritual defense read Taoism which developed during the waring period of ancient China. Be like water not stone.
This is not going to save us on one level we must pay for our evolutionary handicap of the sins of modernism but it is a redemptive act of humility of embracing the truth instead of embracing our passions and hubris. We have a very short time to do this. As we approach the end time we experience a speeding up of time. We are rapidly escalating out of control in a chaos of turbulence and dysfunction. The way we can deal with this loss of control is embrace it. Maintain dignity by embracing this new spirituality which in reality was the old one. We didn’t realize what that old way was until we left it and lost it. We must return to who we once were having learned what we now are is fatally wrong.