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A Preliminary Investigation of Energy Return on Energy Investment for Global Oil and Gas Production
1
Program in Environmental Science, State University of New York –
College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse NY, 13210, USA
2 John S. Herold, Inc., Norwalk CT, 06851, USA
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Received: 5 May 2009; in revised form: 9 June 2009 / Accepted: 16 June 2009 / Published: 13 July 2009
Abstract: Economies are fueled by energy
produced in excess of the amount required to drive the energy
production process. Therefore any successful society’s energy resources
must be both abundant and exploitable with a high ratio of energy
return on energy invested (EROI). Unfortunately most of the data kept
on costs of oil and gas operations are in monetary, not energy, terms.
Fortunately we can convert monetary values into approximate energy
values by deriving energy intensities for monetary transactions from
those few nations that keep both sets of data. We provide a preliminary
assessment of EROI for the world’s most important fuels, oil and gas,
based on time series of global production and estimates of energy
inputs derived from monetary expenditures for all publicly traded oil
and gas companies and estimates of energy intensities of those
expenditures. We estimate that EROI at the wellhead was roughly 26:1 in
1992, increased to 35:1 in 1999, and then decreased to 18:1 in 2006.
These trends imply that global supplies of petroleum available to do
economic work are considerably less than estimates of gross reserves
and that EROI is declining over time and with increased annual drilling
levels. Our global estimates of EROI have a pattern similar to, but
somewhat higher than, the United States, which has better data on
energy costs but a more depleted resource base.
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