The Fracking "Miracle" Explained. Could it be Done Again?

 

An image from Louis Delannoy's thesis presentation at the INRIA in Grenoble on Sep 15, 2023. Louis (you see him at the bottom left of the picture) worked on modeling the energy transition using models that took EROEI (energy return of energy invested) explicitly into account. The results are in line with what we already know: the transition is possible but not easy. However, Delannoys' approach to the calculations led to several interesting insights. One is about how tight oil revolutionized the oil market in the 2010s. It turns out that shale oil was a small technological miracle. Can it be repeated? A crucial question for the future of humankind. The following text is inspired by Delannoy's thesis, although it reports personal reflections of mine. 

"Game Changer" is an abused term, but it perfectly applies to the impact of fracking on the oil market in the 2010s. While the experts mostly agreed that the decline in the US oil production was definitive, unexpectedly, the market was flooded with the new "tight oil" or "shale oil" produced by "fracking," which by now exceeds the production of conventional oil in the US by a ratio higher than 60%/40%. Tight oil production is still increasing in the US, and it may continue increasing for at least a few years, although at increasing extraction costs.  (image source)

The success of the tight oil operation raises several questions: Why was it so successful? Why didn't it arrive earlier? Why wasn't it predicted? How long will it last? Can it be replicated outside the US?  

The biophysical view of oil extraction assumes that the "easy" resources (that is, the low-cost ones) are extracted first. These are the resources that provide the highest EROI (energy return for energy invested) and those that provide the highest economic return. As these resources are depleted, the extraction effort moves to lower EROI and hence more expensive resources. Prices must be increased to maintain profit, and that negatively affects the demand. The result is the familiar, bell-shaped "Hubbert Curve." (here seen as an illustration from the original 1956 paper by Marion King Hubbert).

It was because of this view that, in the 2000s, many energy modelers tended to dismiss shale oil as a short-lived fad. When the industry started extracting it the reaction was that, since shale oil came much after the start of the decline of conventional oil, it must be a last-ditch attempt to extract from low EROI resources. Indeed, the complexity and sophistication of the machinery needed for the various operations of shale oil drilling are impressive. You would think that the whole Rube Goldberg machine is inefficient and expensive, an impression reinforced by the multiple statements in the financial media that investors mostly didn't make any money on fracking. 

But that doesn't seem to be the case. Take a look at the table at the beginning of this post. While conventional crude in the US now has an EROI of around 10 at the wellhead, the estimate reported by Delannoy from a paper by Brandt et al. is around 30 for shale oil, again at the wellhead. Do not place too much trust in these numbers; they are affected by large uncertainties. But they go straight in the face of the simplified biophysical model that sees extraction moving smoothly from high EROI to low EROI resources. 

So, what's happened? Well, it is one of the rules of the universe that "God chooses the foolish things to confound the wise (1 Corinthians 1:27). The wise, aka the "experts," tend to focus on what they know and dismiss what they don't know. The record of experts in understanding technological revolutions is extremely poor. In the energy field, they tend to put a lot of trust in "new technologies," but almost always, they bet on the wrong ones, e.g., hydrogen. In parallel, they miss the true revolutions, such as shale oil. 

Even recently, experts are totally unable to believe or understand the new game-changer, photovoltaic energy, which now has an EROI large enough to trash all fossil alternatives. Most experts are not familiar with photovoltaic technology. They just cannot understand how an apparently simple gray slab can compete and outmatch the giant steam turbines operated by a huge nuclear plant. Fortunately, efficient technologies tend to affirm themselves by the pure force of their efficiency. It happened for shale oil; it is happening for photovoltaics. We are watching changes happening even though we often don't understand them. As usual, the future decides for us. 

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A few more points to consider

1. The rise of tight oil is sometimes used to po-pooh biophysical modeling and the Hubbert curve. That's a bad mistake. The biophysical model is good, it is perfectly describing what happened in the US during the past 20 years if you take into account the high EROI of shale oil. Technology is one of the factors that can change the game: airplanes do not invalidate Newton's universal gravitation law. 

2. Tight oil was a success, but that doesn't mean it is a good thing, nor that it will last forever. It keeps us dependent on liquid fuels and postpones the badly needed transition to renewable energy. Fortunately, even this high-EROI resource can't last forever. Despite some optimistic claims of "centuries of prosperity," it is likely to peak and start declining in the coming few years. 

3. The story that investors didn't make any money on shale oil is a little more difficult to understand. If shale oil has such a good EROI, how can it be that people didn't profit from it? Tentatively, it can be explained by assuming that profits were nearly completely reinvested into new drilling. Note, indeed, how steep is the growth curve of shale oil production. Apparently, investors have been waiting for shale oil to gain a stable place in the market before starting to go for profits. We read in financial journals that most investors declared that they are now stopping to pour money into new shale wells, focusing now on maximizing profits. It may be one of the reasons for the recent rise in our prices, 

3. It is a good thing that the EROI of liquid-producing technologies alternative to shale oil, such as Coal to Liquids (CTL) and Gas to Liquids (GTL), have such a low EROI (look at the image from Delannoy's thesis above). It means that when tight oil starts declining, we won't see a rush to synfuels (thanks, God!). We may see an attempt to move to tar sands, but even in that case, the EROI is probably too low to repeat the shale oil miracle. 

4. There remains an open question in a geopolitical context. Why is it that tight oil is extracted only (or almost only) in the US? Clearly, the US industry has developed efficient technologies for horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. But these are not so complex that they cannot be replicated elsewhere, and the US industry itself may be interested in applying them in other countries. So, why, for instance, isn't Russia developing the Bazhenov Formation, located in western Siberia? According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the total Bazhenov shale prospective area has tight oil resources of more than one trillion barrels. Maybe it is an exaggeration (these estimates often are), but it is a huge amount that corresponds to about 30 years of consumption at the current rates. There are many other potential resources of tight oil in the world but none is exploited at a significant rate. This geopolitical game is destined to remain a mystery for now, and we can only hope that the photovoltaic revolution will soon make liquid fuels obsolete.

Louis Delannoy at his thesis discussion on Sep 15th, 2023, in Grenoble. He wears a "Limits to Growth" t-shirt (you can buy one yourself on Zazzle). 

 

But what is this EROI (Energy Return on Energy Invested)? And why is it so Important?

 

If you are a lion, you don't just have to run faster than a gazelle; you have to make sure that the metabolic energy you obtain from eating the gazelle is higher than the energy you used for the chase. If not, you die. It is the harsh law of the EROI. 

The concept of Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI or EROEI) has been around for a long time. It was introduced in its modern form in the 1980s by Charles Hall, but it is steeped in the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium systems. It can be easily understood if you see it as the equivalent of ROI (return on investment). ROI (EROI) is given by the money (energy) returned from a certain investment (energy infrastructure) divided by the monetary (energy) investment. You need a value larger than one in order for your investment to make sense or, if you are a lion, to survive. Large values of this parameter make life easy for investors, energy producers, and lions (although not for gazelles). (*)

Up to recent times, the conventional wisdom was that the EROI of fossil fuels was very high: during the heyday of oil extraction, it was said to be been around 100. Think of an investment that brings back to you back your capital multiplied by one hundred (!!), and you can understand why oil was, and remains, so important for our society. At the same time, the EROI of renewable energy was calculated to be of the order of 5-7, with some studies even placing it under 1. That gave rise to the narrative that only oil and other fossil fuels could sustain an industrial civilization and that renewables were not really so; at best they were "replaceables" as long as there was oil available. The consequence was an emphasis on social and political solutions: degrowth, energy saving, return to a rural economy, or, simply, accepting that we are all going to die soon. 

How fast things change! New studies, including one by Murphy et al., revealed that the EROI of oil may never have been so high. You need to take into account that oil in itself is useless: it needs to be transported, refined, and burned inside inefficient engines to provide energy for society. So, it is correct to calculate the EROI of oil at the "point of use" rather than at the "well mouth." Once that's done, it turns out that oil's EROI may well be (and have been) lower than 10. At the same time, technological progress and scale factors led to an improvement in the EROI of renewables (wind and photovoltaics) well over 10. 

Now, the paradigm is reversed. Renewables are truly renewable, while oil never was. That gives us a chance to revisit the dominant paradigm of how to face the energy crisis. The new paradigm is that we can rebuild a society that works on renewable power. It won't be the same as the one created by oil, and we may have to accept a considerable economic contraction in the process to get there. But it gives us a fighting chance to create a resilient and prosperous society. 

Of course, not everyone agrees on these concepts and there is a lively discussion in which several people are defending the old paradigm. One argument in the discussion says that if you use oil energy to refine oil, that energy should not be  counted in the denominator of the EROI ratio. And, therefore, that the EROI of fossil fuels is much larger than what the recent calculations indicate. This is silly: energy is energy, it doesn't matter where it comes from. Nafeez Ahmed discusses this point in detail in his blog, "The Age of Transformation" saying, among other things, that:

.... petroleum geologist Art Berman published a post also claiming that Murphy et. al’s paper is fundamentally incorrect. He concluded that if Murphy and his co-authors were right, then decades of EROI research showing extremely high values for fossil fuels would be wrong. He repeats the same argument as Hagens, and then uses it to offer a new calculation:

Nearly 9% of the total post-extraction costs for oil are for refining. Yet most of the energy for refining comes from the crude oil and refined products used in the refinery. It is, in effect, co-generated. That doesn’t negate the energy investment needed to operate the refinery but it is not a cost to society as indicated in the table… I divided their 8.9% for refining investment by 3 to account for the co-generation described above (it is probably much lower). The resulting oil EROI is 18. That completely removes the good news from Ahmed’s and Bardi’s proclamations of ‘mission accomplished’ and restores oil EROI to the consensus range for the last two decades.

The key error in this argument is where Berman says: “That doesn’t negate the energy investment needed to operate the refinery but it is not a cost to society as indicated in the table.”

But that is incorrect. The term ‘cost to society’ pertains precisely to energy invested which is not available for use by society. While the energy used to refine the crude oil is co-generated, it is still an input into the refinement process before the oil becomes available for actual work in society at the ‘final energy’ stage. In other words, the energy is being used to refine the oil and is therefore not available for society in any case.

What Berman and Hagens are effectively trying to do is classify the energy used to refine oil as an ‘energy output’ that represents useful work for society outside of the energy system. But this classification doesn’t make sense when we consider that it represents work that is specifically related to making the energy usable for society in the first place - because the oil must be refined and processed before it can actually be converted into usable energy for society.

Berman further questions that if EROI for fossil fuels was much lower, how could it have been so profitable?

As earth system scientist Ugo Bardi has pointed out, the profitability of an industry depends on numerous factors outside the energy system related to credit, markets, economic policy, investment, currency values and beyond. But in addition to that, the bottom line is that Murphy et. al’s research suggests that if oil has been profitable with EROI much lower than previously believed, then previous assumptions about economic prosperity requiring much higher EROI levels are questionable.

Because of the huge efficiency losses of converting energy from oil into useable forms (between 50 and 70% of energy is lost converting primary energy to final energy), as renewables avoid those losses they can produce about 50% less energy to meet demand. This means that the presumed minimum EROI to sustain a viable civilisation derived from fossil fuels could be much lower in a more efficient system.

As Marco Raugei points out, the shift to renewables and electrification “may open the door to achieving the required services with much lower demand for primary energy, which in turn entails that a significantly lower EROI than previously assumed may suffice”.

To learn more about EROI, you can look at these papers

The Role of Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) in Complex Adaptive Systems, by Ilaria Perissi, Alessandro Lavacchi, and Ugo Bardi), Energies, 2021

Peaking Dynamics of the Production Cycle of a Nonrenewable Resource, by Ilaria Perissi, Alessandro Lavacchi, and Ugo Bardi, Sustainability 2023

And yet it moves. Why the EROI of renewables may be higher than that of fossils

 

Eppur si move; (yet it moves). Galileo is said to have pronounced these words after having been condemned for supporting the heliocentric model of the solar system. New ideas take time to be accepted, and often the resistance against them is tenacious. This is especially true when the new ideas change an existing paradigm. It was the case for the heliocentric model; it may be the case for renewable energy technologies. So far, they have been considered little more than toys for greens, but now we face a radical change of paradigm: they may be able to do better, -- even much better -- than fossil fuels. That's far from certain, of course, but it is what's emerging from the data and the calculations. And if it will turn out to be true, our future will be completely different from what we thought it would be.   

The idea that renewable energy can provide a better energy return (EROI) than fossils is often met with not just skepticism; as it would be normal for a still unproven hypothesis. It is seen as absurd, impossible, unbelievable, outworldly, and worse. If you mention it in the discussion on social media, you risk being insulted, berated, accused of nefarious intentions, and your mental sanity questioned. It happened to me with the comments on my previous post. 

It is understandable that radical changes in paradigms upset people, making them worried and even angry. It happened with the heliocentric view of the Solar System at the time of Galileo, and if it turns out that renewable energy is a technology superior to fossil fuels, then it is an even larger change of paradigm. You know how deeply fossil fuels changed the world. Renewables may have similar effects, although in different ways. 

Now, please don't make me say that the higher EROI of renewables is an established truth. It is not. But from the data we have, I suspect that it might be. In any case, it is surely an idea well worth exploring. For a long-term view, you can see a paper of mine. Here, I'll try to discuss some available evidence that favors this possibility. 

The central point of this discussion is a paper by Murphy et al., who re-examined the available data about the EROI of energy sources, making sure that the evaluations were carried out in comparable conditions. That is, ensuring that the yield was compared at the "point of use" (POU) rather than at the "well mouth," which would give an unfair advantage to fossil fuels. Renewables directly produce usable energy, unlike fossil fuels which, after being extracted, need to be processed into fuels and turned into useful energy in inefficient thermal engines. 

The data presented by Murphy et al. indicate that the EROI of photovoltaics may be about five times larger than that of crude oil. Of course, all data and their interpretation are affected by uncertainties. So, let me propose some additional evidence that goes in the same direction. 

One obvious consequence of a high EROI for a technology is that you expect it to grow fast. It is the same mechanism of compound interest that generates exponential growth in the yield of a financial investment. This growth is proportional to the return on investment (ROI), the financial equivalent of EROI. Ultimately, in our economic system, energy is worth money, and a technology that has a good energy yield also has a good ROI, so we expect it to grow fast. (*)

On this point, there is no doubt that renewable energies are growing fast; very fast, especially for photovoltaic energy. Here are the current growth curves for photovoltaic energy (from "Our World in Data")

PV energy production is growing at an approximately exponential rate of about 25% yearly, leading to doubling every three years. Actually, the rate has been closer to 35% during the past few years, with a doubling time as low as two years. PV grows faster than any other modern renewable technology; the whole sector is growing at 16% yearly. 

But how fast does PV energy need to grow to prove that it has a higher EROI than fossils? At the very least, it should grow faster, and it does. Let's take a look at the data for global oil production:

During the heyday of the age of oil, in the 1950s and 1960s, production was doubling every 8-10 years, corresponding to a growth rate of 7%-8% yearly. Much slower than PV is doing nowadays. 

We can carry out the same evaluation for other energy technologies. In the 1970s, nuclear energy had a doubling time of a little more than 2 years. Meaning a growth of 25% per year. For coal, during the late 19th century, production doubled in no less than 20 years. Finally, biomass for power production never grew at high rates nor produced amounts of energy comparable to those of renewables. 

Overall, these data indicate a qualitative proportionality of the growth rate of a technology with its EROI. The fastest growth rate is observed for PV, in agreement with the proposals by Murphy et al. for an EROI around 20 on the average. Nuclear also fits this interpretation with a high EROI reported by Murphy et al, but for a plant lifetime larger than that of PV. The POU EROI of oil is reported by Murphy as around 5; and that fits with the slower growth rate. Note that the EROI at the well mouth may have been high in the 1960s -- over 30; but the POU EROI may have been similar to the current one. About the slow growth of biomass power production, it fits with the data indicating a low EROI. Regarding coal, the proportionality seems to be lost, since coal may have had a large EROI. But the data for more than a hundred years ago can't be compared with those of our times. 

In the end, I think the main evidence for the high efficiency of renewable energy is this graph that comes from recent Bloomberg data, (Figure by R. Craig)

You see how, for the same investment, renewable energy is growing fast (16% for the average, 35% for PV), whereas fossil fuel production is growing very slowly, if at all. 

These data strongly support the idea that renewables, and PV in particular, have a larger, actually much larger EROI than fossil fuels. That seems to be true for the present situation, but the question is for how long the growth of renewables can maintain this high EROI and continue growing. At some point, the curve will necessarily start flattening out, as it has already happened for oil and nuclear. The limits of the availability of solar energy are far away, but mineral resource bottlenecks are possible and even probable. These bottlenecks would have the effect of increasing the energy costs of new plant, and cause their EROI to plummet. Also, political factors are not to be discounted. Nuclear energy was rapidly growing in the 1960s, and you might have thought that it would soon replace fossil fuels. Indeed, people were speaking about the upcoming "nuclear age." But the technology was killed mainly by political and strategic factors. Today, if governments want to kill renewable energy, they can do that (and may be preparing to do exactly that). 

How long does the curve need to continue growing? Right now, wind and solar produce about 3500 TWh per year, a little more than 2% of the world's primary energy (about 160,000 TWh/year ). Actually, we don't need to ramp up production to such a level. Taking into account the losses in turning fossil fuels into energy and the various inefficiencies of the current infrastructure, Jacobson estimates that we need no more than half of that to match the current demand. Even with 50,000 TWh, our civilization would survive, although rather battered. Yet, it is a steep climb that we face, from about 5% to 100%. (For a more quantitative estimate, see this paper of mine with Sgouridis and Csala). Can we make it? It is a fighting challenge, but it is not impossible. At the current growth rates, renewables could reach 100% of what we need in one or two decades.  

The future, as usual, is obscure. But we have one of those opportunities that happen once in a lifetime (the lifetime of a civilization!).  

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(*) No energy technology can start its growth by pulling its own strings. In the beginning, it needs the support of energy from an already established technology (it is what we called "the sower's paradigm"). Coal grew on wood and human energy, oil grew on coal, and, at present, renewables are growing using the energy produced by oil and gas. The capability of a technology to grow on itself appears only when it has reached a significant fraction of the total production; it depends on the EROI -- and only technologies with a good EROI can reach this stage. Surely, the EROI of renewables is more than sufficient for them to support themselves. 

Is the Energy Return of Renewables Really Higher than that of Fossil Fuels? A Rebuttal to Art Berman's Criticism

 

The "net energy cliff," a popular graphic often used to demonstrate that renewables will never be able to support an industrial society. It is mostly wrong or at least obsolete. The EROI of crude oil never was so high as shown here, and the idea that there is a "minimum EROI needed" to support modern society is debatable, to say the least.

It is a very good thing that Art Berman, a well-known expert in oil and fossil fuel matters, has intervened in the EROI debate on renewables with a recent post. It means that the EROI is becoming the focus of the debate, as it should be. The most recent data indicate that the EROI of renewables significantly surpasses that of oil when examined at the "point of use" rather than at the "well mouth." And, of course, as users of energy, the point of use it is what we are interested in.

First of all, a note: nowadays, the debate on the energy transition is almost purely political. As such, it is based on slogans, and we know that slogans are not based on data or facts. So, it is a pleasure to see that Art Berman, a well-known expert in matters related to oil and fossil fuels, engages in a fact-based debate. That allows me to respond with a different interpretation, still remaining within the boundaries of what a debate should be; with the discussants respecting each other. 

This said, let me go to Berman's criticism which is specifically directed to a recent paper by Murphy et al., where the authors make the point that the EROI of renewables is now significantly larger than that of fossil fuels when a correct comparison is made. 

The problem, here, is that social media are flashing with messages that say that Murphy's paper is "wrong" or that it contains "mathematical errors." It is not true, but when everybody keeps repeating the same thing, it becomes true. It has already happened with the 1972 study, "The Limits to Growth," which was said so often to contain "wrong predictions" that it became common knowledge that it did. Except that it didn't. But that's the way the memesphere works. 

I think that the element that has generated the idea of "errors" in Murphy's paper is described here by Berman.

  

This statement from that paper was a huge red flag for me.

“Even if crude oil were measured to have an EROI of 1000 or more at the point of extraction, the corresponding EROI at the point of use, using global average data for the energy “cost” of the process chain, would still only be a maximum of 8.7.”

This means that the supply-chain energy costs for refining and product distribution create a permanent penalty that prevents oil from reaching an EROI of more than 8.7. It furthermore implies that refining must be a marginally profitable business at best which it is not.

At first sight, the statement by Murphy et al., looks strange, even unreasonable. But it is not so. It is a correct interpretation of how the concept of EROI works. 

The EROI is the ratio of the energy produced to the energy spent to make a certain energy production system work. It is something deeply embedded in the concept of "biophysical economics." It derives from the idea that the human economy works in the same way as an ecosystem. Not just because they have the same term "eco" (from the Greek oikos) in the name, but because they are both "dissipation structures," in the sense described by Prigogine long ago. A dissipation structure turns energy into waste or, if you prefer, does its job of increasing the entropy of the universe. (see some references at the bottom of this post).

So, the EROI is analogous to the economic return on investments. In mathematical terms, it is the same as the "effective reproduction rate" in biology, and also to the "reproduction number" (Rt) that was so fashionable during the pandemic, when people struggled to "flatten the curve." In EROI terms, they were striving to reduce the EROI of virus replication. The opposite of what we are trying to do with energy sources!

Unfortunately, as they say, "the devil is in the details," and the discussion on EROI is affected by misunderstandings and by the unavoidable uncertainty involved in evaluating complicated systems such as the oil industry. The paper by Murphy et al. that Berman discusses is aimed at clarifying a fundamental problem: "energy" is a well-defined physical quantity, but we are not interested in energy as such, but in energy potentials. A concept that defines how much useful work can be obtained from energy. The energy potential is a mix of the two fundamental concepts of energy and entropy. We are interested in, basically, how much entropy we can create using what we call an "energy source" (sun, oil, wind, whatever). 

And here is the point of the discussion: you can measure the energy embedded in a barrel of oil and compare it to the energy embedded in a lithium battery. But the battery will dissipate that energy in the form of electric power at more than 90% efficiency. To obtain the same amount of work from the oil contained in the barrel, you have to go through a series of steps, including transporting, processing, refining, more transporting, and finally burning it inside a thermal engine that, typically, has an efficiency of about 30%. Not all energies are created equal!

That's the key point of the reasoning in Murphy's paper. They note, correctly, that the EROI of crude oil is often measured at the "mine mouth" or "well mouth." That is, it does not include the energy lost in the various steps needed to turn the oil into useful energy. They use the term EROI(POU) (point of use) to indicate the correct way of estimating the EROI of crude oil when it is a question of comparing it with that of solar or wind energy, which directly produce useful electric energy. 

In this procedure, it is perfectly reasonable that the EROI of oil at the "mine mouth" or "well mouth" has no importance in determining the EROI at the point of use (POU). It is because a multi-stage EROI chain works like a metal chain: it is as strong as its weakest link. In the ratio of "Energy Out" to "Energy In," the first term is the energy produced by the last step of the chain, instead, the "Energy in" is the energy lost (and hence in need to be replaced) at each step. We could write that:

EROI = Eout/(Ein(1) + Ein(2) + Ein(3) +.....).

And you see that if, say, Ein(2) (refining) is much larger than Ein(1) (extraction), then reducing Ein(1) (increasing the EROI of extraction) will have no significant effect on the overall EROI. Note that in this view, all energy inputs are treated as the same. They may not be in terms of monetary costs, but it is another matter. 

Having established that Murphy et al.'s proposal that oil's EROI is no more than 8.7 is not a mistake but a correct interpretation of the definition of EROI, we need to examine whether it is a likely interpretation of the current situation. Berman criticizes it on the basis of several observations; for instance, that it would mean that refining would be at best an unprofitable business, which is not. 

I trust Art completely if he says that refining is profitable. But we don't have a precise correspondence between profitability and EROI. Besides, if we think of an EROI of 8.7 in financial terms, you would be very happy the return on your investment is more than 8 times the capital invested! The problem, here, is that the EROI is a ratio of two energy flows, but it says nothing about how large these flows are. If they are very small, of course, it matters little how large the EROI is. Here, Berman makes a correct point when he notes that, 

"Society does not function and survive on the per-unit net energy to society but on the full-system net energy delivered to society. This is like saying that I can solve my personal financial problems by delivering newspapers because the per-unit returns are so high. The net income from the paper route is so small, however, that it wouldn’t even help with the monthly escrow payment on my mortgage."

Equivalently, we could say that engaging in a career as a beggar requires a very small initial investment, and hence it has a high ROI, but it is not a good way to make a living. Nevertheless, while this is true in financial terms, in terms of energy production it is a restatement of what I called the "Godzilla Egg" fallacy: a small egg does not mean that the adult creature will be small. Obviously, renewables will not solve any problem as long as the energy they provide to society is small -- no matter how low the cost. But, of course, renewables can grow

Their potential of renewables in terms of solar energy available is enormous, even though we may run into other kinds of limitations in terms of mineral resources. But, at present, these limits are not preventing renewables from growing fast, and their good EROI indicates that the materials used can be effectively recycled using the energy that renewables themselves produce. Some European economies already produce half or more of their electric power from renewable sources, for instance, Germany. So, it is possible to move onward and create a sustainable energy infrastructure that will last for a long time and that will sustain a resilient human civilization, not anymore depending on the vagaries of the depletion of mineral energy resources.   

There are many more points that could be discussed in relation to Berman's post, mainly about the idea that the low EROI of fossil fuels cannot be so low as some studies indicate because it would be insufficient to sustain a complex industrial civilization such as ours. That would require a long discussion. Let me just say, here, that the "minimum EROI needed" for civilization is, at best, a debatable concept and that the value of "5-7" should be understood as highly uncertain, to say the least. 

I think these are the main elements of the story. If you want to know more about the concept of EROI as an essential element of biophysical economics, I suggest two recent papers that I published together with my coworkers Perissi and Lavacchi

The Role of Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) in Complex Adaptive Systems, by Ilaria Perissi, Alessandro Lavacchi, and Ugo Bardi), Energies, 2021

Peaking Dynamics of the Production Cycle of a Nonrenewable Resource, by Ilaria Perissi, Alessandro Lavacchi, and Ugo Bardi, Sustainability 2023

The EROI of Photovoltaic Energy is now Higher than that of Crude Oil has Ever Been.

This is an article that I published today in the Italian newspaper "Il Fatto Quotidiano." As a discussion, it is not very deep -- of course, it is written for the general public and these articles have a limit of 650 words. Yet, I think not many people, even among energy specialists, have realized the silent revolution that has turned photovoltaic energy from an expensive, niche technology into something that has an EROEI higher than that of petroleum in the "golden days." Don't expect it to "replace fossil fuels," as some people would expect it to do. It is a different technology, with different capabilities, different applications, with its strong and weak points. But it is starting to change the world, and it will. 

How about hydrogen, the subject of this blog? Well, if we have cheap and abundant energy from PV, we could use hydrogen to store it. But that is an expensive storage solution and will be used (if it is ever used) when all the other possibilities have been exhausted.

 

Photovoltaic Energy is an Opportunity that the Country Should not Miss

Imagine a bank account that pays you 100% interest  That is, after you have deposited 1000 euros, it gives you another thousand euros at the end of the year, and so on every year. You would like a bank account like that!

Obviously, there is no bank account that yields so much, but there are technologies that yield at such levels, albeit not in monetary but in energy terms. There is an article published this month by Fthenakis and Leccisi which reviews the situation and finds a truly excellent yield of photovoltaic technology due to the technological improvements of the last 5-7 years. In practice, for good insolation, as we could have in Southern Europe, a photovoltaic system returns the energy needed to build it in about a year! We are now at the levels of oil during its heyday, when it was abundant and cheap, and perhaps even oil was not doing so well at that time.

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That of Fthenakis and Leccisi is not the only article that comes to this conclusion, all recent studies on the subject come to similar conclusions. A very recent article in “EDP Science” . Basically, the electricity produced by photovoltaic plants is often the cheapest in absolute terms, the growth of installations continues to exceed forecasts, and we are now talking about the "photovoltaic revolution." We face the real possibility of eliminating fossil fuels once and for all from the global energy system.

Now, I know that you are already with your fingers on the keyboard to write in the comments "but the variability?" "I don't want to see panels in front of my house!" "And how about waste ?" and things like that. I know. Everyone knows these things. However, think about that.

We have a technology that costs less than the others, and which is particularly suited to Italy, “the country of the sun.” It allows us to produce energy in our home without having to import it at a high price. We also have the added benefit of having mountains that we can use for storing  energy in the form of hydroelectric reservoirs. There are many other ways to manage variability - it's not an unsolvable problem . Then, about waste and recycling, we will have to invest in it, of course. But keep in mind that photovoltaic systems do not use rare or polluting materials. They can be recycled without major problems and we will certainly do so in the future. At the moment, it is a marginal problem.

In short, photovoltaic energy is an opportunity that we should not miss to relaunch the "country system" in Italy. And, indeed, things are going pretty well. In Italy we have reached 10% of electricity production from photovoltaic energy and it is a good result from which we can start decarbonise to truly the energy system. Certain things seem to have been understood nationally. You can read it in the "Pniec", Integrated National Plan for Energy and Climate, which provides for a fundamental role for renewable technologies, and in particular for photovoltaic energy.

But there remains a resistance rearguard formed by a rather ill-matched coalition that includes the oil companies, the diehard nuclearists, the cold fusion miracleists, those who are still paying the bills for the diesel car they bought, and, in general, a whole section of the environmental movement that rejects any change in the name of a "degrowth" thinking that we'll be happy to stay in the dark and in the cold.

To everyone their opinions but, in practice, at this point the only thing that can block the photovoltaic revolution is bureaucracy, perhaps the only truly "infinite resource" in the universe. On this point too, the government seems to be willing to do something to streamline and speed up the procedures of installation. It won't be easy, but with a little patience, we will get there.