To whit: when the oil industry's "minimum dollars per barrel prices to justify creating new wells" go up (as I believe these numbers have done), this is a symptom of permanent depletion. Producers first go after the available reserves that are the cheapest (in many ways this means "the least energy-intensive" ) to extract. The less they spend to extract, the more profit, obviously.
So when these particular values they're quoting here go up (and again, I think they have vs numbers I've seen not that long ago), it's because the producers are running out of cheap, easy to extract product. This mean Energy Returned (hydrocarbons) is shrinking in relation to Energy Invested (fuel and other resources burned up just to get the hydrocarbons out of the ground).
In turn, lower EROEI in the oil patches means humanity has less available energy to do the things they like to do, like making money, eating, having homes built, and pretty much nearly everything any one of us does with our days and what products are available to buy at what price. It essentially means our LIVES get more expensive.
Make no mistake, without the MASSIVE availability of high EROEI hydrocarbons, our 8B global population is completely unsustainable. These numbers going up is a bad sign, completely in and of themselves, regardless of the population's shrinking household incomes, higher prices, inflation, etc. In fact, these numbers going up? They cause all those problems, yes, but often not through greed, but rather through physics.
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