david murphy, Tag

I began posting on TOD in 2008 when I was a PhD student working with Charles Hall on basically everything energy but focusing specifically on the connections between EROI (energy return on energy invested) and the economy...

Hall and Day (2009) report that the EROI for coal might be as high as 80 and that for hydropower, EROI is 40. Does this mean that coal is twice as ‘good’ as hydro? The answer is no, and in this post I will discuss how...

The 9th International ASPO Conference will take place in Brussels, Belgium from 27 to 29 April 2011. Based on the theme of "European Energy Policy in an era of expensive energy" ASPO 9 will cover a wide range of topics related...

For decades, economists (Cornucopians or optimists) have been at odds with natural scientists (Malthusians or pessimists) when it comes to the scarcity of natural resources...

It is easy to become befuddled by the current discourse on peak oil. Peak oil is defined generally as the point at which the flow rate of oil to society has reached a maximum. But this simple definition has issues too, such...

At the most recent ASPO-USA conference, I gave a presentation as part of a panel hosted by The Oil Drum. The subject matter of my post was taken from a recent paper developed by Charles Hall and me on peak oil, net energy,...

The following is a brief portion of a paper of the same title that we (Charles Hall and I) wrote and that is currently under peer-review. I will be presenting on this topic at this year’s ASPO conference in Washington,...

The following is the second of two posts based on a recent paper published under the same title in the journal Environment, Development, and Sustainability...

The following is the first of two posts based on a recent paper published under the same title in the journal Environment, Development, and Sustainability...

The following multi-part series is taken from a paper we published last year in the free, on-line journal Energies. You may access the entire PDF here. All references can be found in the pdf. Part 1 can be found here. Part...

The following multi-part series is taken from a paper that my colleagues and I published last year in the free, on-line journal Energies. You may access the entire PDF here. All references can be found in the pdf. Part 1...

The following multi-part series is taken from a paper that my colleagues and I published last year in the free, on-line journal Energies. You may access the entire PDF here. All references can be found in the pdf.

The history of modern humankind has undergone two major energy transitions, marked by the invention and development of agriculture and the discovery and exploitation of oil...

The “Don’t Fear the 2010s” article written by Nick Gillespie of the Wall Street Journal featured a section on Peak Oil and, after reading it, I found myself uttering the famous words of Homer Simpson: “Doh.” The...

One feature of this year’s ASPO conference that I most enjoyed was the contradiction amongst presentations. Marcio Mello gave an animated talk on Sunday night about the pre-salt formations off the coast of Brazil quoting...