Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 BioPhysical Economics and Resource Quality (2018) 3:15 https://doi.org/10.1007/s41247-018-0048-1 ORIGINAL PAPER A New Approach to Calculating the “Corporate” EROI Luciano Celi 1,2  · Claudio Della Volpe 1  · Luca Pardi 2  · Stefano Siboni 1 Received: 31 May 2018 / Accepted: 29 October 2018 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 Abstract The EROI is one of the most important indices to evaluate the net energy output of a source of primary energy (there is a lively debate on the usability of this kind of parameter, but here we will use it under the hypothesis that it is a good way to establish if an oil company has a level of efciency close to other energetic sources). It is generally defned as the ratio between the energy extracted by a given resource and the energy costs sustained to extract that energy. We tried to set up an alternative method for the calculation of the EROI, taking (1) as a proxy of the energy costs the available data about the CO 2 emissions of the oil companies, as reported in the sustainability reports (SRs), recommended by the international organisms such as IPCC and WBCSD, although not mandatory, and (2) as a proxy of the energy extracted the CO 2 emissions estimate obtained by a stoichiometric conversion of the oil/gas production declared by the oil companies. Both proxies have been also corrected to take into account the diferent CO 2 emission rate per unit energy of oil and gas. The resulting estimates of EROI are rather homogeneous and not too diferent from the values reported in the literature. The method could be suitable for year-by-year comparison of the time evolution of this important energy quality parameter for the individual energy- producing and energy-delivering companies. Keywords Corporate EROI · Oil production · GHG emissions Introduction The present time energy conundrum needs to be rationally unraveled by quantitatively comparing the various available primary energy sources. Most energy analysts consider the EROI, acronym for energy return on (Energy) Investment, as the best tool to estimate the quality of the energy sources of a society (Hall 2017; Fizaine and Court 2016; Court and Fizaine 2017; Cottrell 1953; Gagnon et al. 2009; Gupta and Hall 2011; Hall et al. 2008). Although a number of diferent Energy Return Ratios have been defned (Brandt and Dale 2011; Brandt et al. 2013a, b, 2015a; Cleveland 2006a, b, 1992, 2005; Murphy et al. 2011; Mulder and Hagens 2009; Gagnon et al. 2009; Guilford et al. 2011), the simplest choice is to calculate the ratio between the energy delivered to the society by the producers and the energy employed to get that amount of energy (Hall and Klitgaard 2011). For the simplest form of human society, that of hunters-gatherers, the aggregate EROI is given by the sum of the individual returns of the members of the society, suitably corrected by the efects of cooperation. Not much diferently, the EROI of industrialized societies can be seen as the sum of the EROI of the diferent energy producers corrected by the efects of cooperation and competition. If this is true, it would be vital to estimate the EROI of the individual energy-producing companies and, in particular, that of the petroleum compa- nies, since today oil and gas globally provide more than 50% of primary energy consumption, and because oil and gas, as fnite resources, are expected to show a time declining EROI. Usually EROI is simply defned as In spite of the simplicity of the concept, many difculties arise in calculating meaningful values of EROI for diferent sources of primary energy and set up a sensible compari- son among the EROI of the diferent energy technologies (Hall et al. 2013). One of the main problems is the def- nition of the boundaries within which the calculation and (1) EROI = Energy extracted Energy costs . * Luciano Celi luciano.celi@unitn.it 1 Department of Civil, Environmental and Mechanical Engineering, University of Trento, Trento, Italy 2 Institute for the Chemical and Physical Processes, National Research Council, Pisa, Italy