dohboi said:
Thanks, short.
That is worrying.
I hadn't heard that approach to depletion rates before.
But shouldn't that--subtracting a fixed amount every year--yield not a depletion curve but a straight line to zero?
Sorry to be so hopelessly and permanently confused. Should have taken more math, I guess. (I did make it through intro calc in college, but I've forgotten most of that.)
Sorry
dohboi, but because of the actions of a very self serving, self centered, very ignorant person who has now managed to shoot their own foot off, along with a lot of other people's, I have been forced to move my writing studio and my office equipment. The machine and its software that I used to construct graphs is now in storage. So I can't put a graph up for you right now; so I'll try to explain this in simpler terms and hope that you can visualize it.
As an example: let's say that the ERoEI of crude at the well head is 100:1. Each year the ERoEI drops (theoretically) by one unit, so that the following year the ERoEI is 99:1, the year after that 98:1, and etc.
Now, the first year when the drop was from 100:1 to 99:1 the loss was 1 unit, or 1%. If you plot this as
Energy Lost on the vertical side of a graph, and
Time on the horizontal side of the graph, from year 1 to year 90 you will have a very slowly sloping upward line. On year 90, when the ERoEI has reached 10:1, the line of the graph will begin to move upward very rapidly. The slope of the line at any point past year 90 will be rapidly approaching infinity. That is, your losses are increasing as a proportion of the total energy as time moves forward.
This is what we are presently experiencing with the energy that is available to do work in the general economy from oil (and, also, probably other fossil fuels). If the ERoEI was 22:1 at peak (like it was for the Continental US in 1971) and we subtract 12 units from that ERoEI (to adjust for getting that oil from the well head to the consumer) and we peaked in 2005, the ERoEI at the consumer, assuming a 0.5% decline per year in ERoEI, it is now about 8:1. That is, we lost 6.25% of our energy to run the general economy in 2008. In 2009 we will lose 6.7%.
By 2012 we will be losing 8.3% per year, and from 2008 to 2012 the accumulated loss will be of 36.1%. Neoclassical economics does not incorporate this into their model. Energy is priced in flat dollar terms, which does not properly look at its increasing scarcity. To the neoclassical economist the world is linear, and price has to be the controlling factor. Simple physical laws, like thermodynamics, are not even a consideration.
This bodes very badly for the future. The ongoing stimulus packages require growth to be affective. Growth we are not going to get regardless of how much currency the governments of the world dump into their economies. You can not get growth without a commensurate amount of additional energy to power it. The Keynesian economist, who is determined to have perpetual growth at any expense, is now shoveling the rest of the world's wealth down the preverbal rathole.
We will seen a slight leveling off in the decline rate of economic activity over the next few months. This will occur as energy companies decimate their E&D operations to bring profitability back, and that will temporary re-inject energy back into the general economy. Its effect will, however, be short lived. By the end of 2010, (when most new development for oil has ceased) we can expect to start seeing foreign central banks collapse and brick economies follow them.
By 2013, with shortages of everything appearing and governments collapsing around the world, it will become generally apparent that these purveyors of knowledge and shepherds of our well being couldn't find their asses with both hands and a full length mirror. We will then begin the decades long project of rebuilding a sustainable world.
The road to get there will be littered with the carcasses of those who strove to insure that the day would never come about!
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