Joe discusses politics and economics in the United States.
By: Joe Makoto
-Opinions Editor-
A large number of stories have been written recently telling us about the miracles of hydrofracking and tar sands mining, and about how they would bring the United States back to energy security and possibly energy independence. Besides the evidence of tremendous amounts of environmental impact with both hydrofracking and tar sands mining, there is another problem. That is the issue of net energy, the energy left for the rest of society after accounting for the energy used to get the energy.
Drilling down a mile or more into the earth, often in remote areas, takes a tremendous amount of energy. Mining tar sands, mixing it with water, heating both with natural gas until oil emerges, takes energy. The energy returned from oil recovered has to be greater than the energy used for it to make sense to society. Scientists have termed this Energy Returned Over Energy Invested, EROEI (pronounced E-Roy) for short. High EROEI hydrocarbon resources leave a lot of energy left for the rest of society; low EROEI resources cost everyone more.
What hydrofracking and the mining of tar sands really signal is that the era of the high EROEI hydrocarbon is over. We are now tapping resources left in the ground at an earlier date because, at that time, there was so much high EROEI oil to be had. That high EROEI oil has now been depleted. The new fields are far in the deep ocean, requiring billion dollar ocean rigs to get to, or possibly in the Arctic, where weather and remoteness often take their toll.
In this context, hydrofracking and tar sands mining make sense. Once, they were too expensive to bother with, but after having depleted easy to get supplies, oil companies have made the calculation that these supplies are the best of what is left. As a society we should not take this as a good sign, but to adapt quickly to a more energy constrained future.
