This is a guest post by Roger Brown, known as Roger K, whose graduate work was in physics. In reading about net energy and EROEI, he realized that energy balance alone is insufficient for characterizing the economics of energy production. In this post, he develops a multi-variable approach to account for the cost of other production resources. This post is the first publication of his innovative ideas. A summary is available at the end of the post.

Labor Cost of Energy

In order to produce an economic output, you have to invest production resources. At a minimum some amount of human labor must be invested. There is no such thing as a labor-free production process. Even if you lived in a sparsely inhabited tropical paradise filled with streams jumping with large tasty fish and heavily laden fruit trees growing profusely in the natural forests, you would still have to spend some amount of time gathering fruit and fish.

If you could gather all the food you needed for a single day in a half hour of work, then your food would be very cheap. If you lived in a less productive natural environment and had to spend eight hours a day gathering all of the food you needed, then your food would be very expensive.

An intermittent but longstanding theme here on theoildrum is that dollars do not sufficiently inform us of the long term details of energy depletion, and that the inexorable race between technology and depletion can be better understood using biophysical methods. Essentially this post suggests that it is requiring more and more energy to procure the same amount of natural gas in Canada, and this trend will likely continue into the future. This update makes the initial analysis too pessimistic on the rate of EROI NG decline but also too conservative on the absolute level of energy return. It is going to be a very interesting few years as Canada declines, Barnett peaks, and Haynesville and other unconventional plays ramp up. The treadmill spins on.

(New readers, click "there's more" below for the whole article...)

Global Total Liquids production and oil price, January 2002 to present. Production data from the IEA, data files supplied by Rembrandt Koppelaar. Monthly average WTI oil prices from Economagic.

With oil reaching $135 / barrel, Oil Drum readership exceeding 30,000 unique visitors per day and many wild stories circulating in the MSM as to why oil prices are so high this post strives to explain why oil prices are rising exponentially:

• Supply and demand
• Decline of older fields
• Declining net energy and energy density
• New mega-projects
• OPEC spare capacity
• Peak exports