Depletion is winning
Charles A.S. Hall, Jessica G. Lambert, and Stephen B. Balogh
The decline in EROI among major fossil fuels suggests that in the race between technological advances and depletion, depletion is winning. Past attempts to rectify falling oil production i.e. the rapid increase of drilling after the 1970 peak in oil production and subsequent oil crises in the US only exacerbated the problem by lowering the net energy delivered from US oil production (Hall and Cleveland, 1981). Increasing prices, thought by most economists to negate depletion through increasing incentives for exploitation, cannot work as EROI approaches 1:1, and even now has made oil too expensive to support the high economic growth it once did."
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Or Post Peak Everything - Better Yet
Depending on who you believe the odds are that we are heading towards a major adjustment in the source, nature and quantity of energy available for input into the macro-economy for the production and consumption of goods and services . All correlations indicate a clear unmitigated cause and effect relationship between energy consumption and outputs produced by the system. Let's state the obvious. When energy consumption falls by 25%, then so will economic activity. This of course spells disaster for just about anything you could imagine.
So the concern is not when we hit peak oil extraction and production - it is what happens after and how quickly these levels decline . If decline rates are too rapid then there will be little chance to mitigate the shortfall in energy inputs and the related economic activity. D ark days.
Platinum Wealth Partners
April 4, 2014
