This post relates to an article written by my advisor Charles Hall and a close friend of his. The article is available from American Scientist (paywall) or from Professor Hall's web site.

There are only finite resources in the world, but population continues to grow. How will this situation resolve itself? This was a question a group of scientists (Meadows et al), commissioned by the "Club of Rome," attempted to answer back in 1972, in a book called Limits to Growth. The model they presented predicted growing resource scarcity, increasing pollution, and eventual population decline, all prior to 2100.

Charles A. S. Hall and John W. Day revisit these predictions in an article published this month in American Scientist called Revisiting the Limits to Growth After Peak Oil. Their analysis indicates that the predictions from 1972 were surprisingly accurate, considering how long ago they were made:

According to Hall and Day, "The values predicted by the limits-to-growth model and actual data for 2008 are very close."

We welcome all readers to the newest TOD sub-domain: "The Oil Drum: EROI" – or Energy Return on Investment. This sub-domain will be administered by Professor Charles Hall and his Ph.D. Student, David Murphy (EROI Guy) as well as by many of the other editors and contributors from TOD that write about net energy analysis and biophysical economic concepts.

We have at our school (SUNY – College of Environmental Science and Forestry) an “EROI Institute” (web site is operational, but still undergoing development) which is basically three offices, two relatively large, and a bunch of books and computers. There are roughly 8 graduate students at any one time and usually about half a dozen undergraduates hanging around. We all work on sweating out various analyses related to energy. We have only quite minimal funding and work on a shoestring although many students are supported by NSF fellowships, teaching assistantships or funding that we do have for tropical research. So with that introduction, let us turn our attention briefly to describing why we think EROI is important.

Below is an email sent by Professor Charles Hall from SUNY-Syracuse detailing his recent trip to an international Geology conference in Norway. Though written for his friends and colleagues, I thought the details and insights he shared from his trip to Norway would be worth sharing with the TOD readership, particularly the comments on peak oil and climate change. Charlie also tells me he has a new paper published next week on EROI economics which I will format and post here.

_{Annual rates of total drilling for and production of oil and gas in the US, 1949-2005 (R² of the two = 0.005; source: U.S. EIA and N. D. Gagnon). Since drilling and other exploration activities are energy intensive, other things being equal EROI is lower when drilling rates are high.}

As oil prices increase and the presidential campaigns heat up there is a lot of discussion about increased drilling for oil. In economic theory higher prices will give market signals to increase exploration and exploitation of resources and hence deliver more to society, although at a higher price. Will this in fact occur with oil for the United States? Of course we will not know until we do it, but we can look to the past for hints. The enclosed figure represents the history of drilling and production for oil and gas in the United States. The answer seems inescapable: the rate of drilling for oil in the United States has been unrelated to finding or producing oil and gas, which is determined principally by geology. Mother nature, not market theory, determines resource availability, at least in this case and probably many more. (Source: Hall, Powers and Schoenberg (in press))