There’s no time to lose. The new research led by the French team confirms that whether we like it or not, human civilisation is in the midst of the most rapid transformation of the global energy system we’ve ever experienced. And hanging on for dear life to the old, dying fossil fuel paradigm is a recipe for civilisational suicide. Nafeez Ahmed
French scientists warn that the oil industry is collapsing so fast it will derail renewables, Nafeez Ahmed wrote in Byline Times.
In just 13 years, a team of French government energy scientists found that global oil production could enter "a terminal and exponential decline, accompanied by the overall collapse of the global oil and gas industries over the next three decades.' This collapse could derail any effort to transition in time for green energy to fill the gap, leaving a world of nearly 8 billion people in some form of economic collapse that will be impossible to escape.
It's not that the earth doesn't have plenty of fossil fuels locked below the surface to exploit. But, the oil industry has to use more and more energy to extract additional sources of oil and gas. The low-hanging fruit of easily accessible oil exploitation is long gone with the exception of Arabia. The industry is finding extraction more brutal to remove energy from oil reserves miles below the ocean surface, exploiting the world's carbon sinks such as the Amazon and the Congo, and the risky extraction from thawing permafrost and drilling in the Arctic ocean. “The oil industry is increasingly eating itself to stay alive. The oil and gas industries are consuming more and more energy exponentially to keep extracting oil and gas. That's why they've entered a downwards spiral of increasing production costs, 'diminishing profits, rising debt, and irreversible economic decline.”
The transition to green energy requires massive amounts of carbon to build the infrastructure and for the installation of the technology. If the oil industry collapses, it will jeopardize the transition.
The key to understanding all this is in how the new study, published in Elsevier’s Applied Energy journal, applies the concept of ‘Energy Return On Investment’ (EROI).
Pioneered by systems ecologist Professor Charles Hall (whom I worked with on my book Failing States, Collapsing Systems) EROI measures how much energy you must use to extract energy for a given resource or technology. The metric works as a simple ratio that estimates the quantity of energy you can get out for every single unit of energy that’s put in. So obviously, the higher the ratio the better, because it means you can get more bang for your buck.
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Their research found that 15.5% – more than a tenth – of the energy produced from oil worldwide is already necessary to keep producing all the oil.
Yet this is getting worse, not better. Since the production of the easiest-to-get conventional oil slowed down and plateaued around fifteen years ago, we’re increasingly relying on forms of difficult-to-extract unconventional oil that uses greater amounts of energy for more complex techniques like fracking.
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By 2024 – within the next four years – the amount of energy we are using for global oil production is going to increase to 25% of energy production. In other words, the world will be using a quarter of the energy produced from oil just to keep producing that oil.
But instead of getting more efficient, fossil fuel technologies are getting less efficient – which is why the quantity of energy we need to keep producing oil is exponentially increasing.
By 2050, fully half of the energy extracted from global oil reserves will need to be put back into new extraction to keep producing oil. The authors have an interesting name for this self-defeating phenomenon: they call it, “energy cannibalism.”
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Perhaps the most alarming implication of the new research concerns renewable energy technologies. The authors conclude:
“… either the global energy transition takes place quickly enough, or we risk a worsening of climate change, a historical and long-term recession due to energy deficits (at least for some regions of the globe), or a combination of several of these problems.”
So if we delay the clean energy transformation for too long, there might not be enough energy to sustain the transition in the first place – leading to a ‘worst of all worlds’ scenario: the collapse of both the fossil fuel system and the ability to create a viable alternative.