“Energy cannibalism”Basically it is the trend of using more and more energy to extract energy. Whether the energy being used is diesel refined from conventional oil to facilitate the drilling and extraction of light shale oil, or it's using coal or gas fired electricity to pump oil out of, or seawater into, an old conventional oil field.
It's a simple fact that the net energy to society from oil drilling has been in decline, basically since the inception of oil wells. I mean as soon as they started to fill wooden barrels with oil from the gushers 100 years ago and ship them across country using coal fired trains the rot was setting in. Now of course the rot back then wasn't at all bad for society, oil became available for mass usage for the first time. But it doesn't change the fact that energy was consumed to take the energy away from the field and process it now does it.
Now today the energy consumed simply to get the oil out of the ground is phenomenal. How much energy is consumed to access a deepwater field and bring the oil to shore? How much to drill the plethora of horizontal shale wells and fill them with sand and chemicals? This is why looking at touted oil production figures and "the peak" of oil is actually a misleading exercise. It made sense in the 1990's when Colin Campbell first put forward the overall concept of peak oil as coming in 2007, but the cannibalism since his day has muddied the waters. And you can't see through muddy water, it's opaque.
2025: A Civilizational Tipping PointIn the past couple of posts I already hinted at how the US shale boom will soon come to an end, and also mentioned the net energy predicament besetting the petroleum and mining industry. The process of replacing high yield, low energy cost fields with ever costlier ones is a well known “secret” of the industry, but nary a single soul talks about it outside geologist circles. You see, it’s not that we will run out of oil from one day to another, catapulting our entire society into the dark ages ahead, but that oil extraction will return ever less net energy over time… To the point of diminishing returns, resulting in a relentless economic contraction, making any transition to any other energy source impossible. The Journal of Petroleum Technology, the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ flagship magazine has published an article in 2023 saying just that:
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“Energy necessary for the production of oil liquids is growing at an exponential rate, representing 15.5% of the energy production of oil liquids today and projected to reach a proportion equivalent to half of the gross energy output by 2050 (Delannoy et al. 2021).
When the energy required for the extraction and production of these liquids is taken into account, the net-energy peak is expected to occur in 2025 at a level of 400 PJ/d [1]. In the foreseeable future, the energy needed to produce oil liquids could approach unsustainable levels, a phenomenon called “energy cannibalism.”
The concept of energy cannibalism is becoming increasingly relevant, as mounting energy use in oil production means the very resources needed for the transition to renewable energy may be constrained, particularly when viewed from a net-energy perspective and in terms of economic growth.”
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Peak net energy means that no matter how hard we try to replace our declining easy-to-tap traditional oil reserves with tar sands, or ultra-deep wells drilled into the seafloor, beyond a certain point we will no longer be able to increase the amount of oil available for other uses (like manufacturing, transport, mining, agriculture, etc.). “Energy cannibalism” does not stop at the peak though: it will continue to take ever more energy to maintain oil extraction as existing fields “mature”. Operating drilling equipment, pumping seawater or CO2 into ageing wells to uphold production, delivering sand used in re-fracking existing wells etc. will continue take up an ever larger portion of the oil produced — as well as other forms of energy — leaving less and less for the rest of the economy (2). Is it any wonder then that oil companies have opted to pay back their investors instead of drilling new wells, and called it a day?
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https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/ ... um=reader2So 2025 for a net energy peak, but bear in mind that even though more oil product has been made available to society, the relative cost of it has increased so much since the 2008 peak of conventional oil that the lifestyle of the average "consumer" on the planet has clearly declined. Take away the oil 'consumers' have borrowed from the future (debt) and the situation is far worse.
So next year it will be worse, and the year after worse still. It's like were all on a diet of rabbit and vegetables but the rabbits are feeding in the vegetable patch. As the number of rabbits grow and grow to meet our growing demand the vegetable patch gets smaller and smaller. Eventually we'll be on a rabbit only diet and that my friends leads to what's known as rabbit starvation.