US Minerals Databrowser

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) is the administrative branch in charge of managing information regarding mineral resources within the United States. Its minerals information function that collects, analyzes, and disseminates data that describe current production and consumption of about 100 mineral commodities, both domestically and internationally for approximately 180 countries.The goal of the US Minerals Databrowser is to make it easier to extract meaningful information from this valuable dataset. The US Minerals Databrowser provides several different visualization styles, each tailored to answer a specific set of question regarding the USGS Minerals dataset.

US Production / Exports

This visualization uses the production, apparent consumption, imports and exports fields from the dataset. Net exports are calculated as exports - imports. This plot highlights how sustainable US use of a particular mineral is.

World Production / Price

This visualization plots both US and world annual production of each mineral. The nominal price per ton as well as the inflation adjusted price (in 1998 dollars) are overlain. This plot highlights the interplay between price and production as anticipated by basic economics -- high prices should bring about increased production for globally fungible commodities.

Price Evolution

Plotting inflation adjusted prices against global production create interesting plots that give insight into how well the price signal works for a particular mineral.

Usage History

Usage patterns for any mineral will change as new uses are found and older applications are discontinued. The Usage History plots historical timelines of consumption in all the major usage categories.

Usage Pie

Pie charts provide a quick, intuitive view of relative consumption in each category for a single year to answer the question: "What is this mineral used for?"

Top Energy Crisis Resources

In this 125th Best of the Energy Crash & Limits to Growth blog post I have collected the top links on the topic of energy crisis and resource depletion.

Books

• Environment, Power and Society for the Twenty-First Century: The Hierarchy of Energy
• Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization
• Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air
• The Limits to Growth - The 30-Year Update

Movies

• Blind Spot
• Collapse
• In Transition
• Natural Regression
  
• Project HOME - A hymn for the planet
• What a Way to Go - Life at the End of the Empire

Research Reports

• Global Oil Depletion Report 2009 (UKERC)
• Growth isn't Possible
  
• Planetary Boundaries
• Project Discovery: Energy Market Scenarios (Ofgem)
• Searching for a Miracle: ‘Net Energy’ Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society
• The Oil Crunch - a wake-up call for the UK economy
• Tipping Point: Near-Term Systemic Implications of a Peak in Global Oil Production
  
• Top Ten Things to Know about Oil Supply

Videos

• How Food Shapes Our Cities
• The Landscape of Oil
• Transition to a World Without Oil

Recommended further resources

• The Oil Drum
• Energy Bulletin
• Earth Policy Institute
• Energy Export Databrowser
  
• Gapminder
• Post Carbon Institute
  
• Transition Network
  

Peak Oil and Resource Depletion

Anatoly Karlin is the author of the Sublime Oblivion Blog on the geopolitics of limits to growth has assembled many links to relevant articles on Peak Oil and Resource Depletion to provide a foundation for the those interested in exploring these very important concepts. It includes these top links on these issues:

Basic Summaries

• The Coming Oil Crisis (Lionel Badal)
• Hubbert’s Peak Mathematics (Luís de Sousa)

Core Books on Resource Depletion

• Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update (Meadows et al)

Peak Oil Projections

• Analysis of Decline Rates (Sam Foucher)
• Insights Regarding Future World Oil Production (Rembrandt)

Energy & the Economy

• Oily Origins of the Economic Crisis (Anatoly Karlin)
• Accounting for Growth: The Role of Physical Work (Robert Ayres)

Renewables

• Renewable Energy Outlook 2030 (Energy Watch Group)
• Renewable Transition: Targets & Troubles & EROEI Uncertainty (Jeff Vail)
• Renewable Fuel Contenders, Pretenders and Niches (Robert Rapier)

In his new post AK collects Emerging Technologies: Limits to Growth vs. Moore’s Law.

Exergy Evolution of the Mineral Capital on Earth

Dr. Alicia Valero is a lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Zaragoza and works in the Centre of Research for Energy Resources and Consumption (CIRCE).

Her main scientific research areas are exergoecology and energy efficiency. In particular, she has had extensive involvement in the application of the exergy analysis in the global assessment of mineral resources on earth.

Download her PhD thesis (English): Exergy Evolution of the mineral capital on Earth

Abstract

The 20th century has been characterized by the economic growth of many industrialized countries. This growth was mainly sustained by the massive extraction and use of the earth’s mineral resources. The tendency observed worldwide in the present, is that consumption will continue increasing, especially due to the rapid development of Asia, the desire for a higher living standard of the developing world and the technological progress. But the physical limitations of our planet might seriously restrain world economies. In fact, many mineral commodities such as oil or copper are already showing signs of scarcity problems, and consequently their prices are increasing sharply.

Our society is based on an inefficient use of energy and materials, since there is a lack of awareness of the limit. If resources are limited, their management must be carefully planned. But it is impossible to manage efficiently the resources on earth, if we do not know what is available and at which rate it is being depleted.

Therefore, the aim of this PhD has been the assessment of the physical stock on earth and the degradation velocity of our mineral resources due to human action. This has been accomplished through the exergy analysis under the exergoecological approach. This way, the resources are physically assessed as the energy required to replace them from a complete degraded state to the conditions in which they are currently presented in nature. The main advantage of its use with respect to other physical indicators is that in a single property, all the physical features of a resource are accounted for. Furthermore, exergy has the capability of aggregating heterogeneous energy and material assets. Unlike standard economic valuations, the exergy analysis gives objective information since it is not subject to monetary policy, or currency speculation.

Examples of scientific contributions

With the relative abundance of the substances in each of the earth’s outer spheres obtained in this PhD, and the thermochemical information, we were able to calculate for the first time, the average Gibbs free energy, enthalpy of formation and chemical exergy of the atmosphere, hydrosphere and upper continental crust. Furthermore, since the mass of each layer of the earth is well known, we have obtained the first estimation of the earth’s specific chemical exergy: 1,22E9 Gtoe.

This study has obtained an inventory of the most important renewable and non-renewable resources on earth measured in exergy terms. The main novelty introduced in the inventory is the combined assessment of energy resources with non-fuel minerals. Since exergy is an additive property, we have been able to obtain the total exergy of the non renewable energy resources, including nuclear, fossil fuels and non-fuel mineral reserves. Furthermore we could estimate for all renewable resources, the rate of current consumption with respect to the available potential use.

Similarly, for non-renewables, we estimated the resource to production ratio. We came to the important conclusion that vast amounts of energy resources are available on earth, especially of renewable nature. However, we are currently using less than 2% of its potential. On the other hand, we have estimated that the reserves of concentrated fuel and non fuel minerals, which can be practically used by man, represent only 0,01% of the chemical exergy of the earth. Furthermore, their global R/P ratio excluding nuclear materials, is less than 100 years. Hence, humankind is not facing an energy crisis, as many claim, but rather a material’s scarcity.

This PhD has applied for the first time the Hubbert model to non-fuel minerals, with the aim of estimating the year were the peak of production is reached. It has been stated that the bell-shape curve is better suited to non-fuel minerals if it is fitted with exergy over time, instead of mass over time. This way, we take into account the concentration factor, which is very important for the case of solid minerals. Consequently, we have developed the required equations for estimating the Hubbert’s peak for all kinds of minerals in exergy terms.

With the available information about world mineral historic statistics and available reserves, we have carried out the first diagnosis of the state of non-renewable minerals on earth. This PhD has estimated through the exergy analysis, the degradation degree of the mineral commodities, detecting the ones being degraded at the highest rates, and the ones facing important scarcity problems.

We have stated that iron and aluminium are the most extracted commodities but not the most depleted ones, due to their crustal abundance. On the contrary, copper, which is also being extracted at very high rates, is already suffering scarcity problems, with more than 50% of its world reserves depleted. Other commodities such as mercury, silver, gold, tin, arsenic, antimony or lead are even more degraded, with more than 70% of their reserves depleted.

Forecasting World Crude Oil Production Using Multicyclic Hubbert Model

A new oil forecast research from Kuwait

The year 2008 has witnessed unprecedented fluctuations in the oil prices. During the first three-quarters, the oil price abruptly increased to $140/bbl, a level that has never been reached before; then because of the global economic crisis, the price dramatically plunged to less than $50/bbl by the end of the year losing more than 64% of the maximum price in less than three months period. The supply of crude oil to the international market oscillated to follow suite according to the law of supply and demand. This behavior affected oil production in all exporting countries. Nonetheless, the demand for crude oil in some developing countries, such as China and India, has increased in the past few years because of the rapid growth in the transportation sector in addition to the absence of viable economic alternatives for fossil fuel. The rapid growth in fuel demand has forced the policy makers worldwide to include uninterrupted crude oil supply as a vital priority in their economic and strategic planning.

Even though forecasting should be handled with extreme caution, it is always desirable to look ahead as far as possible to make an intellectual judgment on the future supplies of crude oil. Over the years, accurate prediction of oil production was confronted by fluctuating ecological, economical, and political factors, which imposed many restrictions on its exploration, transportation, and supply and demand. The objective of this study is to develop a forecasting model to predict world crude oil supply with better accuracy than the existing models. Even though our approach originates from Hubbert model, it overcomes the limitations and restrictions associated with the original Hubbert model. As opposed to Hubbert single-cycle model, our model has more than one cycle depending on the historical oil production trend and known oil reserves. The presented method is a viable tool to predict the peak oil production rate and time. The model is simple, accurate, and totally data driven, which allows a continuous updating once new data are available. The analysis of 47 major oil producing countries estimates the world’s ultimate crude oil reserve by 2140 BSTB and the remaining recoverable oil by 1161 BSTB. The world production is estimated to peak in 2014 at a rate of 79 MMSTB/D. OPEC has remaining reserve of 909 BSTB, which is about 78% of the world reserves. OPEC production is expected to peak in 2026 at a rate of 53 MMSTB/D. On the basis of 2005 world crude oil production and current recovery techniques, the world oil reserves are being depleted at an annual rate of 2.1%.

Ecological Economics - Revaluing the Environment

Growth for growth’s sake is no longer an option. Ecological economists are calling for a ‘green’ revision of incentives and investments, as the starting point for achieving societies that are sustainable in environmental, social as well as economic terms.

Peter May, past president of the International Society for Ecological Economics, has written an excellent summary of the role of ecological economics in the transition to a sustainable economy (appearing in the current issue of The Broker). He contrasts the principles of ecological economics (EE) with those of mainstream economics and points out the key fundamental difference — EE practitioners recognize that the economy is a subsystem of the biosphere, while mainstream economists tend to view the economy as the whole and the environment as the subsystem.

Principles of ecological economics

EE takes as its starting point the notion that the economy is situated within the biosphere (in contrast with mainstream economic theory in which environmental problems are considered only as external reflections of the larger economic system). Resources such as air, water, food, wood, fibre, minerals and energy sources are the foundation of the economy. The economy also draws on the Earth as a sink for its wastes, such as carbon dioxide, toxic chemicals and chloro-fluorocarbons.

Facing reality

What does all this imply for the green economy? From an EE perspective, business as usual is no longer an option. A return to the expectation that a bull market will allow us to ‘grow our way out’ of crisis would mean we have learned nothing.

Rather, it is time to face the reality of biophysical limits and to find institutional and behavioural responses to the underlying contradictions that have brought the global economy to its knees, and that have degraded biodiversity and overheated the planet.

[via SteadyState.org]

(Fly Around) The World Without Fossil Fuels

Bertrand Piccard circumnavigated the Earth in a hot-air balloon. Now he wants to circle it in an airplane powered only by solar energy.

For the dawn of a new decade, adventurer Bertrand Piccard in this TED Talk offers us a challenge: Find motivation in what seems impossible. He shares his own plans to do what many say can't be done -- to fly around the world, day and night, in a solar-powered aircraft.



Bertrand Piccard was born in a family of firsts. His father, Jacques, together with Dan Walsh of the US, was the first man to reach the deepest point of the world's oceans, the Mariana Trench, in 1960. Almost 30 years earlier, his grandfather, Auguste, first ballooned into the stratosphere. While they went up and down, Bertrand went horizontal and in 1999, together with Brian Jones of Britain, completed the first-ever nonstop balloon circumnavigation of the globe, flying more than 45,000 km in 20 days.

Now, in a hangar near Zurich, a team of scientists and engineers around Piccard and co-pilot André Borschberg is building Solar Impulse, an unconventional aircraft designed to circumnavigate the Earth powered by solar energy, flying day and night (yes, when the Sun is "off"). The just-unveiled prototype has the weight of a car but the wingspan of an Airbus. Piccard hopes for test flights in the first half of 2010, and possibly a long flight in 2011, before attempting to fly around the Earth.

In a world depending on fossil energies, the Solar Impulse project is a paradox, almost a provocation: it aims to have an airplane take off and fly autonomously, day and night, propelled uniquely by solar energy, right round the world without fuel or pollution. An unachievable goal without pushing back the current technological limits in all fields...

Economic Dynamics - And the Real Danger

George Mobus has published a new summary paper on his blog Question Everything that he have written to explain the findings from his computer model of an abstract economy's dynamics when it is run mostly on fixed, finite fuel sources such as fossil fuels.

His model describes an abstract economy in which work processes use energy and raw materials to produce assets, some of which are consumed by processes that constitute the major body of the system, some of which will be reinvested in the work processes.

The dynamics of asset production and decay are governed by the laws of thermodynamics. The general conservation law applies to both matter and energy. But the second law, in particular, has ultimate influence over the efficiency and effectiveness of work processes as well as the entropic decay of all forms of assets.

A key question that needs to be addressed is: given our current heavy reliance on fossil fuels for more than 80% of our energy inputs, what happens in an economy that is growing when the resources are depleting?


Many people have realized, either intuitively or logically, that what matters insofar as economic activity is concerned is the net energy — the energy available after extraction of the gross energy (in this case crude oil) and refinement or conversion to a form useful in doing work. Energy must be reinvested in energy extraction, transportation, and refinement in order to gain net energy that can be available for asset production (other than assets needed for energy extraction). Thus there is an energy return on energy invested (EROI or EROEI) that must be taken into account in determining if an economy is viable, stable, or growing.

Check out the very interesting full post on the Question Everything blog.

TEQs - Tradable Energy Quotas

TEQs - An effective and fair response to both climate change and resource depletion?

TEQs (Tradable Energy Quotas) would reduce our reliance on fossil fuels fast, guarantee that we meet our agreed emissions obligations and empower communities to address the challenges of our times, allowing us to move into a happier, thriving future.

All nations need to develop a common purpose in response to two problems. There is the climate problem: oil, gas and coal produce the greenhouse gases that are changing our climate. This is already killing many species and 150,000 people each year, and is only getting worse, with the potential to hit unstoppable runaway conditions within a decade.

And there is the supply problem: reserves of fossil fuels in the ground are being used-up rapidly; in the coming years, there will be deepening scarcities with profound economic, political and social impacts.

We therefore need to manage an energy-descent, cooperating in solutions and alternatives as we go, maintaining a fair distribution of the energy on which we all depend, and starting as soon as we can. We call this the transition to Lean Energy.

TEQs provides the framework that enables a nation to do this, ensuring fair access to energy for all. It supplies the incentive for citizens, organisations and Government to work now on achieving the necessary rapid transformation in the way we use fuel into the future, and it provides time to plan ahead. It empowers localities and individuals to be able to make a tangible difference. It is fair, simple and practical, and it gets results by uniting the nation in a common purpose.

This website, and the booklet Energy and the Common Purpose explain how.

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To find out more, take a look at the brief summary, or for a comprehensive view of how the system works, explore our booklet Energy and the Common Purpose, now in a revised and expanded third edition.

You may also be interested to see the Parliamentary report on TEQs (Aug 2009), read more in our TEQs In Depth section, come to an event, or join the discussions in our TEQs forum (hosted by PowerSwitch).

For links to relevant documents, articles and the work of other organisations in this field see the TEQs links page.

Other names for Tradable Energy Quotas include: Domestic Tradable Quotas (DTQs), Personal Carbon Allowances (PCAs), Personal Carbon Trading, Carbon Quotas, Personal Carbon Rationing and Tradable Permits.

In Transition 1.0 Movie - From Oil Dependence To Local Resilience

‘In Transition’ is the first detailed film about the Transition movement filmed by those that know it best, those who are making it happen on the ground. The Transition movement is about communities around the world responding to peak oil and climate change with creativity, imagination and humour, and setting about rebuilding their local economies and communities. It is positive, solutions focused, viral and fun.

‘In Transition’ has been shown in communities around the world to enthusiastic audiences, and is now available as a special edition 2 disc DVD set, beautifully packaged in entirely compostable packaging, featuring the film itself (with subtitles in Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano,and Nederlands) and an embarrassment of outtakes and extras, with interviews, films about Transition you’ve been searching high and low for quality copies of, and other gems. It is a must-have for anyone with an interest in this new take on responding to the challenges of the 21st century. You can watch the film, in full, here:

Rob Hopkins: Transition to a world without oil

In his new TED talk Rob Hopkins reminds us that the oil our world depends on is steadily running out. He proposes a unique solution to this problem -- the Transition response, where we prepare ourselves for life without oil and sacrifice our luxuries to build systems and communities that are completely independent of fossil fuels.



Rob Hopkins is the founder of the Transition movement, a radically hopeful and community-driven approach to creating societies independent of fossil fuel.

Rob Hopkins leads a vibrant new movement of towns and cities that utilize local cooperation and interdependence to shrink their ecological footprints. In the face of climate change he developed the concept of Transition Initiatives -- communities that produce their own goods and services, curb the need for transportation and take other measures to prepare for a post-oil future. While Transition shares certain principles with greenness and sustainability, it is a deeper vision concerned with re-imagining our future in a self-sufficient way and building resiliency.

Transforming theory to action, Hopkins is also the co-founder and a resident of the first Transition Initiative in the UK, in Totnes, Devon. As he refuses to fly, it is from his home in Totnes that he offers help to hundreds of similar communities that have sprung up around the world, in part through his blog, transitionculture.org

Hopkins, who's trained in ecological design, wrote the principal work on the subject, Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience, a 12-step manual for a postcarbon future.

Peak Oil: Adapting for Big Changes Ahead

Peak Moment Episode 155: Peak Oil: Adapting for Big Changes Ahead
by Yuba Gals Independent Media

With a long-time eye to declining energy resources, Bart Anderson envisions a very different society in five years. The former editor of Energy Bulletin.net offers advice for post-oil living: Understand the problem. Prepare psychologically for big shifts and the unexpected. Find your niche and get good at it. See what your great grandparents did as a model for living well within limits. "Live poor and learn to do it well" as Bart did as a graduate student. Things will be very different, he said, but we'll make it through.

If Nothing Else, Save Farming

It’s probably too late to prepare for peak oil, but we can at least try to salvage food production.

A new blog post by George Monbiot. Go to the original full article here: If Nothing Else, Save Farming

I don’t know when global oil supplies will start to decline. I do know that another resource has already peaked and gone into freefall: the credibility of the body that’s meant to assess them. Last week two whistleblowers from the International Energy Agency alleged that it has deliberately upgraded its estimate of the world’s oil supplies in order not to frighten the markets. Three days later, a paper published by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden showed that the IEA’s forecasts must be wrong, because it assumes a rate of extraction that appears to be impossible. The agency’s assessment of the state of global oil supplies is beginning to look as reliable as Mr Greenspan’s blandishments about the health of the financial markets.

If the whistleblowers are right, we should be stockpiling ammunition. If we are taken by surprise; if we have failed to replace oil before the supply peaks then crashes, the global economy is stuffed. But nothing the whistleblowers said has scared me as much as the conversation I had last week with a Pembrokeshire farmer.

Wyn Evans, who runs a mixed farm of 170 acres, has been trying to reduce his dependency on fossil fuels since 1977. He has installed an anaerobic digester, a wind turbine, solar panels and a ground-sourced heat pump. He has sought wherever possible to replace diesel with his own electricity. Instead of using his tractor to spread slurry, he pumps it from the digester onto nearby fields. He’s replaced his tractor-driven irrigation system with an electric one, and set up a new system for drying hay indoors, which means he has to turn it in the field only once. Whatever else he does is likely to produce smaller savings. But these innovations have reduced his use of diesel by only around 25%.

According to farm scientists at Cornell University, cultivating one hectare of maize in the United States requires 40 litres of petrol and 75 litres of diesel. The amazing productivity of modern farm labour has been purchased at the cost of a dependency on oil. Unless farmers can change the way it’s grown, a permanent oil shock would price food out of the mouths of many of the world’s people. Any responsible government would be asking urgent questions about how long we have got.

Instead, most of them delegate this job to the International Energy Agency. I’ve been bellyaching about the British government’s refusal to make contingency plans for the possibility that oil might peak by 2020 for the past two years, and I’m beginning to feel like a madman with a sandwich board. Perhaps I am, but how lucky do you feel? The new World Energy Outlook published by the IEA last week expects the global demand for oil to rise from 85m barrels a day in 2008 to 105m in 2030. Oil production will rise to 103m barrels, it says, and biofuels will make up the shortfall. If we want the oil, it will materialise.

The agency does caution that conventional oil is likely to “approach a plateau” towards the end of this period, but there’s no hint of the graver warning that the IEA’s chief economist issued when I interviewed him last year: “we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau … I think time is not on our side here.” Almost every year the agency has been forced to downgrade its forecast for the daily supply of oil in 2030: from 123m barrels in 2004, to 120m in 2005, 116m in 2007, 106m in 2008 and 103m this year. But according to one of the whistleblowers, “even today’s number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this.”

The Uppsala report, published in the journal Energy Policy, anticipates that maximum global production of all kinds of oil in 2030 will be 76m barrels per day. Analysing the IEA’s figures, it finds that to meet its forecasts for supply, the world’s new and undiscovered oil fields would have to be developed at a rate “never before seen in history.” As many of them are in politically or physically difficult places, and as capital is short, this looks impossible. Assessing existing fields, the likely rate of discovery and the use of new techniques for extraction, the researchers find that “the peak of world oil production is probably occurring now.”

Are they right? Who knows? Last month the UK Energy Research Centre published a massive review of all the available evidence on global oil supplies. It found that the date of peak oil will be determined not by the total size of the global resource but by the rate at which it can be exploited. New discoveries would have to be implausibly large to make a significant difference: even if a field the size of all the oil reserves ever struck in the USA were miraculously discovered, it would delay the date of peaking by only four years. As global discoveries peaked in the 1960s, a find like this doesn’t seem very likely.

Regional oil supplies have peaked when about one third of the total resource has been extracted: this is because the rate of production falls as the remaining oil becomes harder to shift. So the assumption in the IEA’s new report, that oil production will hold steady when the global resource has fallen “to around one-half by 2030″ looks unsafe. The UKERC review finds that just to keep oil supply at present levels, “more than two thirds of current crude oil production capacity may need to be replaced by 2030 … At best, this is likely to prove extremely challenging.” There is, it says “a significant risk of a peak in conventional oil production before 2020.” Unconventional oil won’t save us: even a crash programme to develop the Canadian tar sands could deliver only 5m barrels a day by 2030.

As a report commissioned by the US Department of Energy shows, an emergency programme to replace current energy supplies or equipment to anticipate peak oil would need about 20 years to take effect. It seems unlikely that we have it. The world economy is probably knackered, whatever we might do now. But at least we could save farming. There are two possible options: either the mass replacement of farm machinery or the development of new farming systems, which don’t need much labour or energy. There are no obvious barriers to the mass production of electric tractors and combine harvesters: the weight of the batteries and an electric vehicle’s low-end torque are both advantages for tractors. A switch to forest gardening and other forms of permaculture is trickier, especially for producing grain; but such is the scale of the creeping emergency that we can’t afford to rule anything out.

The challenge of feeding 7 or 8 billion people while oil supplies are falling is stupefying. It’ll be even greater if governments keep pretending that it isn’t going to happen.

Economic Scenarios for an Age of Declining EROIs

One of the most interesting presentations on the ASPO USA Peak Oil Conference 2009 was delivered by Charlie Hall (ESF) and Hannes Kunz (IIER). This is a short overview of their research.

They suggests that a fundamental change in economic dynamics requires a new approach to macroeconomics. Instead of the traditional "Growth" paradigm their research has lead to a much wider system definition which includes

• Financial systems (money supply, credit, prices, etc.)
• Resource systems (energy, human labor, other natural resources)
• Global flows of goods, energy and funds (exports, imports, balances)
• Population development

The New Paradigm: Decline is as much part of a human ecosystem as is growth

Energy and GDP

Economic Scenarios for an Age of Declining EROIs describes consistent correlations of Energy use and GDP:

GDP$ per Energy Unit Consumed is defined as Total Global GDP (in US$ PPP) divided by the sum of Human Labor and External Primary Energy Inputs.

Primary Energy inputs and economic output are highly correlated, even before eliminating distortions from globalization. Mining, agricultural inputs, raw materials and manufacturing contain a significant amount of “energy accounted for elsewhere”, which is not included in traditional energy efficiency reviews. Most differences can be explained from energy transfers from industrial processes. The result is a rough average of 133 US$ purchasing power parity of GDP produced per GJ of energy input.

The first conclusion of the presentation is that most of our increased “productivity” comes from replacing human labor with fuel and machinery. The “productivity increase” leads to immediate gains for an economy and rising standards of living.

The Energy Squeeze-Out

Over the past decades, our fossil energy sources have become less efficient. Independent of the arrival of “Peak Oil”, increasing amounts of upfront energy are required to explore the next new units of energy. The concept of EROI (Energy Return on (Energy) Investment) describes this as: Energy Units Gained from one Energy Unit Used.

A change of EROIs from 80:1 to 20:1 (current estimate for global oil production) equals a “salary increase” of physical work from oil by a factor of almost 4, significantly reducing benefits to our economy. Higher energy cost quickly reverses previous gains from increased “productivity”.

Looking at EROIs and expected changes shows significant trouble ahead. Transportation will be highly affected by declining EROIs (and thus higher cost). The highest impact however will be seen in agricultural production.

High contribution of energy to food production (4-5% of global non-renewable energy consumption goes into food); in OECD countries, another 10-15% is used for processing and transporting food. With rising energy prices, farming and food processing will have to reduce input and thus output directly with higher fuel prices (less fertilizer equals less crop). Food prices will still rise both due to shortages and higher production cost and squeeze out poorer countries.

Lower EROIs will start squeezing out low-efficiency applications of energy. A significant number of industrial transportation and production chains will become unmanageable.

• Cost of commodity transportation becomes significant
• Global arbitrage of labor cost for low-cost/high-volume goods will become unattractive over long distances
• A substantial portion of global trade (the lower cost bracket) will be unattractive
• Food production and processing will no longer work on todays levels, with more local food and less processing
• Results might be very different compared to most people’s expectations

Download the full presentation in pdf to learn more.

The Global Oil Depletion Report 2009

What evidence is there to support the proposition that the global supply of 'conventional oil' will be constrained by physical depletion before 2030?

The 'peak oil' debate is polarised, contentious and characterised by competing interpretations of the available data.

A growing number of commentators are forecasting a near-term peak in global oil production with potentially serious economic impacts. Others, however, argue that production will be sufficient to meet rising demand well into the 21st century.

The UK Energy Research Centre is the focal point for UK research on sustainable energy. It takes an independent, whole-systems approach, drawing on engineering, economics and the physical, environmental and social sciences. Their new report on Global Oil Depletion, a review of over 500 studies, analysis of industry databases and comparison of global supply forecasts, seeks to bring some clarity to this debate.

The report finds:

• Despite large uncertainties in the available data, sufficient information is available to allow the status and risk of global oil depletion to be adequately assessed. But the available methodologies can frequently lead to underestimates of resource size and overly pessimistic forecasts of future supply
• The rate of decline of production is accelerating. More than two thirds of existing capacity may need to be replaced by 2030 solely to prevent production from falling
• While large resources of conventional oil may be available, these are unlikely to be accessed quickly and may make little difference to the timing of the global peak
• A peak in conventional oil production before 2030 appears likely and there is a significant risk of a peak before 2020. Given the lead times required to both develop substitute fuels and improve energy efficiency, this risk needs to be given serious consideration

Energy 2050

UKERC's another report, Energy 2050, addresses two of the Government's toughest energy policy goals – delivering reliable energy to consumers while meeting its legal commitment to reduce CO2 emissions by 80% by 2050.

Since 2006, researchers at UKERC have been working together on an ambitious project assessing how the UK can move to a resilient (‘secure’) and low-carbon energy system over the period to 2050. The Energy 2050 report synthesises the project findings. A more extended account of the project will be published in book form in early 2010.

The Energy 2050 project brought together a wide range of researchers coming from several disciplines to address a common problem, exploring all dimensions of the possible development of the UK energy system through to 2050. A common set of scenarios was used, making it possible to relate the different elements of the project to each other. While the project relied heavily on scenarios and modelling, it also placed great emphasis on the underlying policy and research questions and the conclusions and implications for action. This report focuses on
these aspects of the work, in order to make it more relevant to policy makers and a wider readership. Technical detail is kept to a minimum but is available in the full Research Reports that were produced by the various work streams of the project. These are being made available on the UKERC website.