80 Results Found

Concerns have been raised that declining energy return on energy investment (EROI) from fossil fuels, and low levels of EROI for alternative energy sources, could constrain the ability of national economies to continue to deliver economic growth and...

The two methods of processing synthetic crude from organic marlstone in demonstration or small-scale commercial status in the U.S. are in situ extraction and surface retorting. The considerable uncertainty surrounding the technological characterizati...

Energy Return on Investment (EROI) refers to how much energy is returned from one unit of energy invested in an energy-producing activity. It is a critical parameter for understanding and ranking different fuels. There were a number of studies on ERO...

This paper is a synthesis of a series of twenty papers on the topic of EROI, or energy return on investment. EROI is simply the energy gained from an energy-obtaining effort divided by the energy used to get that energy. For example, one barrel of oi...

Declining energy return on investment (EROI) of a society’s available energy sources can lead to both crisis and opportunity for positive social change. The implications of declining EROI for human wellbeing are complex and open to interpretation. Th...

In China there has been considerable discussion of how one should express the efficiency of energy conversion and production. Energy return on investment (EROI) can be useful for this because its methodology is based on outputs and inputs. Unfortunat...

In early 2020, Indonesia implemented the biodiesel 30 (B30) program as an initiative to reduce Indonesia’s dependency on fossil fuels and to protect Indonesia’s palm oil market. However, palm oil has received international criticism due to its associ...

The efficiencies of energy extraction and conversion systems are typically expressed using energy return ratios (ERRs) such as the net energy ratio (NER) or energy return on investment (EROI). A lack of a general mathematical framework prevents inter...

Oil and gas are the main sources of energy in the United States. Part of their appeal is the high Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) when procuring them. We assessed data from the United States Bureau of the Census of Mineral Industries, the E...

Oil has played a crucial role in the United States’ continued but increasingly tenuous economic prosperity. The continued availability of cheap, high energy return on investment (EROI) oil, however, is increasingly in doubt. If cheap oil is increasin...

Energy return on investment (EROI) is a ratio of the energy obtained in relation to the energy used to extract/produce it. The EROI of fossil fuels is globally decreasing. What do the declining EROIs of energy sources imply for society as a whole? We...

Net energy, that is, the energy remaining after accounting for the energy “cost” of extraction and processing, is the “profit” energy used to support modern society. Energy Return on Investment (EROI) is a popular metric to as...

Most estimates of energy-return-on-investment (EROI) are “static”. They determine the amount of energy produced by a particular energy technology at a particular location at a particular time. Some “dynamic” estimates are also made that track the cha...

Modern economies are dependent on fossil energy, yet as conventional resources are depleted, an increasing fraction of that energy is coming from unconventional resources such as tar sands. These resources usually require more energy for extraction a...

For many reasons, including environmental impacts and the peaking and depletion of the highest grades of fossil energy, it is very important to have sound methods for the evaluation of energy technologies and the profitability of the businesses that...

Oil sands, as unconventional oil, are so essential to both Canada and the world that special attention should be paid to their extraction status, especially their energy efficiency. One of the most commonly used methods to evaluate energy efficiency...

This study analyzes the feasibility of energy mixes composed of different shares of various types of power generation units, including photovoltaic (PV) and wind farms, hydropower, fossil fuel-based plants, and nuclear power. The analysis uses the co...

Interest has rapidly grown in the use of unconventional resources to compensate for depletion of conventional hydrocarbon resources (“easy hydrocarbon”) that are produced at relatively low cost from oil and gas fields with large proven reserves. When...

How do we know which energy technologies or resources are worth pursuing and which aren’t? One way to answer that question is to compare the energy return of a certain technology—i.e., how much energy is remaining after accounting for the amount of e...

Canada was the world’s third largest natural gas producer in 2008, with 98% of its gas being produced by conventional, tight gas, and coal bed methane wells in Western Canada. Natural gas production in Western Canada peaked in 2001 and remained nearl...

We examined data on fuel consumption and costs for the years 1950 through 2013, along with economic and population data, to determine the percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) spent each year on fuels, including fossil fuels and nuclear ore, a...

In the sustainability context, the performance of energy-producing technologies, using different energy sources, needs to be scored and compared. The selective criterion of a higher level of useful energy to feed an ever-increasing demand of energy t...

We model the low frequency electrical heating of submarine methane hydrate deposits located at depths between 1000 and 1500 m, and determine the energy return on energy invested (EROI) for this process. By means of the enthalpy method, we calculate t...

The authors of this paper have been involved in contentious discussion of the EROI of biomass-based ethanol. This contention has undermined, in the minds of some, the utility of EROI for assessing fuels. This paper seeks to understand the reasons for...

Whether renewable energy sources (RES) will provide sufficient energy surplus to entirely power complex modern societies is under discussion. We contribute to this debate by estimating the current global average energy return on energy invested (EROI...

Renewable energy resources and technologies are sufficient to meet all of humanity’s energy requirements, provided that the transition to renewables is accompanied in parallel by intense, disciplined initiatives to design, fabricate, and distribute u...

This is a review of the literature available on data for the EROI (prior to this special issue) of the following 12 sources of fuel/energy: oil and natural gas, coal, tar sands, shale oil, nuclear, wind, solar, hydropower, geothermal, wave/tidal and...

Given photovoltaics’ (PVs) constant improvements in terms of material usage and energy efficiency, this paper provides a timely update on their life-cycle energy and environmental performance. Single-crystalline Si (sc-Si), multi-crystalline Si (mc-S...

A number of technical solutions have been proposed for tackling global climate change. However, global climate change is not the only serious global environmental challenge we face demanding an urgent response, even though atmospheric CO₂ ppm have ri...

Achieving the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 °C target requires a global-scale energy transition, reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. This transition demands not only a rapid expansion of renewable energy but also significant upfront energy investm...

The following article conducts an analysis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), specifically in relation to Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). We focus on the key drivers of economic growth, how the...

For all of human history except the past two centuries or so, bioenergy provided nearly all the world’s primary energy. Then, fossil fuels largely replaced bioenergy, but concern about climate change and fossil fuel depletion will force a move...

Energy return on investment (EROI) and net energy are useful metrics for analyzing energy production physically rather than monetarily. However, these metrics are not widely applied in China. In this study, we forecast the Daqing oilfield’s EROI from...

Russia is one of the world’s largest producers of energy resources. The production of energy resources in Russia is profitable both economically and in terms of energy production. Currently, Russian oil and gas companies have a policy of increasing e...

The purpose of this paper is to calculate the energy return on financial investment (EROFI) of oil and gas production in the ultra-deepwater Gulf of Mexico (GoM) in 2009 and for the estimated oil reserves of the Macondo Prospect (Mississippi Canyon B...

Nuclear fission is a primary energy source that may be important to future efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The energy return on investment (EROI) of any energy source is important because aggregate global EROI must be maintained at a mini...

In Brazil, sugarcane ethanol competes directly with gasoline as a fuel for motor vehicles, emerging as a challenging biofuel to traditional fossil fuels. The problem this article solves and presents is the Return on Energy Investment (EROI) for the p...

Norwegian oil and gas fields are relatively new and of high quality, which has led, during recent decades, to very high profitability both financially and in terms of energy production. One useful measure for profitability is Energy Return on Investm...

This study explores the impact of oil depletion on the energetic efficiency of oil extraction and refining in California. These changes are measured using energy return ratios (such as the energy return on investment, or EROI). I construct a time-var...

It is often claimed that the cheapest energy is the one you do not need to produce. Nevertheless, this claim could somehow be unsubstantiated. In this article, the authors try to shed some light on this issue by using the concept of energy return on...

Currently, there are considerable discrepancies between China’s central government and some local governments in attitudes towards coal to liquids (CTL) technology. Energy return on investment (EROI) analysis of CTL could provide new insights that ma...

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 in...

The energy cost of drilling a natural gas well has never been publicly addressed in terms of the actual fuels and energy required to generate the physical materials consumed in construction. Part of the reason for this is that drilling practices are...

Economic production and, more generally, most global societies, are overwhelmingly dependant upon depleting supplies of fossil fuels. There is considerable concern amongst resource scientists, if not most economists, as to whether market signals or c...

Agriculture is the largest sector of Pakistan’s economy, contributing almost 22% to the GDP and employing almost 45% of the total labor force. The two largest food crops, wheat and rice, contribute 3.1% and 1.4% to the GDP, respectively. The objectiv...

The Energy Return on Investment (EROI) is an important measure of the energy gain of an electrical power generating facility that is typically evaluated based on the life cycle energy balance of a single facility. The EROI concept can be extended to...

There is a strong correlation between net energy yield (NEY) and energy return on investment (EROI). Although a few studies have researched the EROI at the extraction level in China, none have calculated the EROI at the point of use (EROI_POU). EROI_PO...

We use a system dynamics model to analyse the cycle of production of a nonrenewable natural resource, with a specific interest in crude oil. This subject has been empirically studied for a long time. However, modelling studies able to correlate the p...

The projected increase in the world’s population requires an increase in the production of edible energy that would meet the associated increased demand for food. However, food production is strongly dependent on the use of energy, mainly from fossil...

It is often claimed that marine renewable energy alone could meet the electricity demand of current and future human societies. However, such claims are based on highly uncertain estimations of the global potentials of marine renewable energy sources...