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EROITools

The R package EROITools provides tools to aggregate Energy Return On Investment (EROI) values previously calculated using a Physical Supply Use Table (PSUT) framework to represent the Energy Conversion Chain (see Heun, Owen, and Brockway (2018)). Previous to using the EROITools package, the World Energy Extended Balances (WEEB) from the International Energy Agency (IEA) can be loaded and tidied using the IEATools and ECCTools R packages. The Recca R package then allows analysts to calculate a wide range of EROIs at the product and industry levels, and the EROITools package provides tools aggregate the calculated EROIs by product group. Important features of the EROITools package include the following:

  • Aggregations can be performed either at the global or national level;
  • Aggregations can be performed at both the primary and final stage of energy use, but also at the useful stage of energy use providing that final-to-useful efficiencies are provided by the analyst for each energy product;
  • At the useful stage, the package also allows analysts to conduct these aggregations respecting sectoral or end-use breakdowns, so that the average useful stage EROI of a product group can be calculated for a given final demand sector (for instance steelmaking) or for a given end-use category (for instance high temperature heating);
  • Last, the package allows analysts to add additional energy requirements (supposing that these are provided by the analyst) that cannot be quantified using the IEA’s WEEB such as supply chain energy requirements — see Brockway et al. (2019) or Brand-Correa et al. (2017) for examples of a quantification of such indirect energy flows.

Installation

You can install EROITools from github with:

# install devtools if not already installed
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("earamendia/EROITools")
# To build vignettes locally, use
devtools::install_github("earamendia/EROITools", build_vignettes = TRUE)

History

This package builds upon the previous IEATools, Recca, and ECCTools R packages and will be demonstrated in a paper as soon as possible. The calculations conducted within the package are heavily dependent on the Physical Supply Use Table framework introduced to represent the Energy Conversion Chain in Heun, Owen, and Brockway (2018) and further developed in Aramendia et al. (2022).

More Information

Find more information, including vignettes and function documentation, at https://earamendia.github.io/EROITools/.

References

Aramendia, Emmanuel, Matthew Heun, Paul Brockway, and Peter Taylor. 2022. “Developing a Multi-Regional Physical Supply Use Table Framework to Improve the Accuracy and Reliability of Energy Analysis.” Applied Energy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2021.118413.
Brand-Correa, Lina, Paul Brockway, Claire Copeland, Timothy Foxon, Anne Owen, and Peter Taylor. 2017. “Developing an Input-Output Based Method to Estimate a National-Level Energy Return on Investment (EROI).” Energies 10 (4): 534. https://doi.org/10.3390/en10040534.
Brockway, Paul E., Anne Owen, Lina I. Brand-Correa, and Lukas Hardt. 2019. “Estimation of Global Final-Stage Energy-Return-on-Investment for Fossil Fuels with Comparison to Renewable Energy Sources.” Nature Energy 4 (7): 612–21. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-019-0425-z.
Heun, Matthew Kuperus, Anne Owen, and Paul E. Brockway. 2018. “A Physical Supply-Use Table Framework for Energy Analysis on the Energy Conversion Chain.” Applied Energy 226 (September): 1134–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2018.05.109.