Life Begins at 30:1

The dire global energy and ecological emergency makes it all the more important to identify and understand well the EROI thresholds that we have referred to in earlier postings. In this respect, the EROI trends that we have examined to this point, and thus their consequences, are exacerbated further by the fact that presently 88% of all primary energy used globally is wasted.[1] With overall levels of energy efficiency of just 12% and increasing energy costs of accessing energy, EROIs cannot but continue declining fairly rapidly notwithstanding current rather ineffectual) efforts in many countries to improve energy efficiency at end users’ levels.

It ensues from the above that what matters most overall is how much energy is available at end-user level and at what energy cost. If we refer to EROIs at end-user level as EROIe versus EROIs at primary production level as EROIp, Hall has assessed that an end-user level EROIe of 3.3:1 is the very bare minimum required to maintain some form of industrialised, modern society, and stressed further that this level corresponds to a regime of extreme austerity with no discretionary capacity to use energy for matters like arts, education, improved health, research, and life’s enjoyments, let alone the energy required to address the severe ecological consequences of fossil fuel use.[2] Hall has estimated that this end-user EROIe of 3.3:1 corresponds to a production EROIp of 10:1.

However, we must also take into consideration the very low global energy efficiency evaluated by Murray and King that was published more recently than Hall’s estimates. In our view, in order to be consistent with the Murray and King estimate, in the present situation and for the medium-term at least, instead of the estimated correspondence between minimum EROIp and EROIe used by Hall, we must realistically adopt an EROIp of 20:1 as corresponding to an EROIe of significantly less than 3:1, as the very bare minimum threshold below which social and economic viability is no longer possible.

The above is why the 10:1 EROI level that we have retained in Figure 1 as the threshold below which societal collapse becomes rapidly unavoidable must be viewed as very conservative. In fact, it is most likely that even if EROIs stay below 20:1 for any significant length of time (in the order of a maximum of 10 years) the social, economic, monetary, financial and political breakdown of the world order that prevailed until 2007 must be expected within a relatively short time frame.

Or put in another way, it ensues from the above that actual overall EROIes are now roughly back to where they were in medieval times, with the enormous difference, as abundantly stressed by authors like Hall and Klitgaard or Heinberg, that such austerity EROIs leave absolutely no margin to address the planetary energy and ecological challenges humankind now has to face. That is, in energy terms, the globalised industrialised world no longer has enough discretionary energy spending power, i.e. is now far too poor to both keep going and address the consequences of its actions to date.

More specifically, in order to remain viable our world must generate each year energy flows large enough to:

1. Reinvest part of these flows into ensuring further ongoing energy supplies in subsequent years using existing infrastructures,

2. Sustain the levels of prosperity expected in industrialised countries,

3. Bring more people globally to these levels of prosperity,

4. Alleviate and mitigate the ecological consequences of fossil and nuclear fuels use, and

5. Develop and deploy alternatives to fossil fuels with high enough EROIs to ensure sustainability.

With EROIps passing below 10:1, our globalised world can no longer ensure this combination of energy flows at high enough levels. Put metaphorically, these five types of energy flows fit together like the five fingers of one’s hand. Not only the global financial and economic crisis that has been unfolding since 2007 is fundamentally energy driven but, even more to the point, since around the mid-1990s the industrialised world has begun to relentlessly lose its “fingers” knuckle by knuckle, like a kind of insidious, still largely unseen, leprosy.

Furthermore, it ensues from the above and from our earlier considerations of GDP/head in energy terms, that EROIs substantially over 30:1 are absolutely necessary to achieve the “five energy fingers” and thus to ensure viable and sustained forms of prosperity and as well as to mitigate the ecological consequences of the huge surge of fossil and nuclear fuels use over the last century.

[1] See for example, Murray and King, 2011, Op. Cit.

[2] Hall, Balogh and Murphy, 2009, Op. Cit.

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