Net energy and export land get really complicated but fascinating at the same time.

Consider a factory in china that exports to the US most of the oil imports are actually used for goods and services destined for exports. Do you split this energy use between China and the US ? The point is when you add in the value add product flows on top of the net energy flows between countries it gets a lot more interesting. Looking at the oil exporters that are growing their internal economies one sees they are also increasing imports of all sorts of value add products that have significant embedded energy with a lot of that resulting from oil consumption.

The US obviously sucks in far more energy then is normally assumed via the net inflow of imports. Again looking at the middle east you can look at the food imports and see a large net flow of oil energy back into the region. Mexico also imports a lot of food from the US. So maybe its not so obvious we are actually trading food for goods.

If you combine these concepts the situation is grimmer than assuming they are unrelated. The amount of real excess energy thats available to support our debt economy seems close to zero once you include the movement of value added goods and their embedded energy.

Mexico could already not be a net energy exporter for example consuming as much energy or more then its producing in the form of imports.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3723/is_1_16/ai_114328146

The import export web is exceedingly complex and difficult to figure out but it seems to me that by including the embedded energy that returned back to oil producers in the form of goods and services makes a lot of sense in the full EROEI/export land model.

This also explains to some extent how China could continue to grow even as oil supplies remained flat the energy was put into export goods that where then sent to other markets. In these markets local production of these goods and services declined using less energy so on the energy flow side we see that eventually everything balanced out and its just a changing of the flow pattern so one nations growth has resulted in declines elsewhere.

Once you include the embedded energy value added goods and services that are flowing back into the oil exporting nations and calculate net energy exported the result looks interesting. For wheat and corn for example we have a pretty good idea about the net embedded oil used in their manufacture. ( I don't consider modern farming a natural process ).

I've got no idea what the real numbers are but just looking at the situation indicates that the total energy available for real growth might be quite small inline with the fact that we have seen no significant increases in oil. What seems to have happened is a good bit of the economy is now stuck in a cycle of extracting oil and converting it to value added goods with a net flow of energy back into the original producers leaving close to zero total value add.