Question is in title. My searching is actually rather disturbing this morning as the results are fillled with industry fud and not what im looking for. What im really trying to find is a graph of oil produced historically because I recall we used to get something like a 50 barrel return but now we get single digits.
Edited - thanks for the info. kbin has an issue or at least my account does for some magazines where I can’t see any replies when logged in so I can see it from a non logged in browser but can’t reply so im replying in my post. EROI fits what I was looking for but if anyone finds a nice historical chart for it specifically with oil that would be great but with the EROI term I think I will be able to find it.
I think they mean all the gasoline/oil/energy consumed by heavy machinery like refineries, tanker ships, mining derricks, drillers, prospectors, etc. to manufacture one barrel of finished oil.
Edit: found the term OP is looking for: energy returned on energy invested (ERoEI). It used to be “18 to 43” for conventional oil drilling, but can be as low as 1.5 for the new oil shale extraction, due to needing to burn large amounts of methane gas to heat the ground to free up the oil.