Perissi, I.; Lavacchi, A.; Bardi, U. The Role of Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) in Complex Adaptive Systems. Energies 2021, 14, 8411. https://doi.org/10.3390/en14248411
Perissi, I.; Lavacchi, A.; Bardi, U. The Role of Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) in Complex Adaptive Systems. Energies 2021, 14, 8411. https://doi.org/10.3390/en14248411
Perissi, I.; Lavacchi, A.; Bardi, U. The Role of Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) in Complex Adaptive Systems. Energies 2021, 14, 8411. https://doi.org/10.3390/en14248411
Perissi, I.; Lavacchi, A.; Bardi, U. The Role of Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) in Complex Adaptive Systems. Energies 2021, 14, 8411. https://doi.org/10.3390/en14248411
Abstract
The Energy Return on Energy Invested, EROEI, is known as an important parameter for evaluating the efficiency of energy-producing technologies. In this paper we examine the concept of EROEI from a general viewpoint, giving insights on a wider range of applications. In general, natural resources can be seen as energy stocks characterized by a “potential” that can be exploited by creating intermediate stocks. This transformation is typical of dissipative systems and for the first time we found that Lotka-Volterra model, usually confined to the study of biology of populations, can represent a powerful tool to estimate EROEI for some such systems, providing an understanding of the reason for the overexploitation phenomenon and, in some cases, the collapse of the exploiting system.
Keywords
EROEI; Lotka Volterra; resource exploitation; dissipative systems
Subject
Engineering, Energy and Fuel Technology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
