Ever heard the phase; Cant see the forest for all the trees  

Fascinating! If the cost of doing anything at all were to be evaluated and done with regard to minimum entropy then we would be making rational decisions. When the maximum profit is evaluated with a great deal of positive entropy allowed to be exported elsewhere, then you have our modern so called free market capitalist system. This is rational under current perceived rules, but irrational for the society as a whole. Looks like a blog?

This is an area of analysis I have not seen before and very important.   There is only one problem with getting 600-800 miles/140kwh in an electric vehicle.   We don't have that kind of EV currently.   Also we need nice smooth oil roads(asphalt) roads to drive on!       Lew Pinch

My electric bike gets 20+ miles per kw without pedalling with a very inefficient charger.  That would be 2800 miles for the energy to refine a barrel of oil.

rad

If these numbers are correct the consequences are hughe!  Well, they would be in a rational society....But let's face it : in a rational society an article like this would have been flooded with comments by now. The truth about the electric car: nobody cares...

This is a very important article. Previous studies of the impact of electric cars on the power grid have ignored the electricity saved from not processing oil, although they still indicated that the impact on the grid would be relatively small.

See, for instance, this feasibility analysis:

phev_feasibility_analysis_combined.pdf phev_feasibility_analysis_combined.pdf.

I feel that Dr Chu, in charge of energy policy, should be contacted to draw this to his attention.

 Excellent article that gets to the problem of the inefficient use of energy for cars.  I have sent a letter to the editor of our local paper referencing the article.  Maybe they will run it in our local paper.  

This article needs to be published in the main stream media so our legislators will have a difficult time passing subsidies for the inefficient use of our limited energy supplies for the profit of a few vested interests.

Doug said: "Now, a simple calculation shows that, of the approximately 1470 kWh of potential energy in a 42-gallon barrel of oil, it takes about 140 kWh of electric and natural gas to refine the oil into appx. 44 gallons of "refined products", diesel, gasoline, heavy oil, etc."

According to the DOE: tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pnp_capfuel_dcu_nus_a.htm

and: tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pnp_refp2_dc_nus_mbbl_a.htm

In 2008, US refineries purchased 42.7 billion kWh of electricity and 710.5 billion cu. ft. of natural gas (just over 100 billion kWh @ 50% conversion efficiency) to produce just over 5 billion barrels of "refined products" (my calculations). This works out to somewhat under 30 kWh/bbl.

Being a huge PHEV / BEV fan, I was, like others, excited and inspired by your article and Googled for more info. I came across this site: blog.storybridge.org/2009/07/leave-oil-in-ground-drive-electric-with.html

The author cites your article, does her own research and basically confirms what you said. But, she appears to have made an error in her calculations, making the EV range she states less by a factor of ten.

So now I'm really confused. How did you calculate your 140 kWh/bbl for refining?

Thanks, and apologies in advance if I have made an error.

The range 600-840miles quoted in the article for EV's may be a bit high, but not so far out that the thesis of the article is incorrect.

The Mitsubishi MiEV gets around 100 miles for a 16kwh battery:

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/05/the-battery-pac.html

The battery won't be run flat though, so you are getting well over 6 miles per kwh.

This is a tiny car, so if you are going to run big cars for America you might get quite a lot less.

OTOH maybe the economy means that most that will be run will be NEV's.

So it is swings and roudabouts, the figures are in the right ball park and support the argument.

Doug, excellent article.  Estimates I've read go up to 12kwh per gallon of gasoline when you total all the transportation, exploration, drilling and pumping impact.  There is also a huge amount of steam expended for refining.  The GM Volt travels 5 miles per kwh.  It only would need a 8kwh battery pack, but supplies a 16kwh pack for an additional safety/cycling 'cushion'.

Another great analysis by Doug Korthof! I've been a fan of his EV writings for years (you can subscribe, you know.)

A little math and a question: is the average EV mileage 4.57 miles/kwh (640/140 = 4.57)? My Dodge Neon EV conversion goes in between 3 and 4 miles/kwh. 

Otherwise, this excellent article illustrates how important it is to look at the most significant criteria to make intelligent decisions at political levels: the cost to society. This cost to society is a "cradle to grave" concept, which unearth all the costs including hidden and deffered costs that we all WILL incur in the future! I wish more people were applying this concept in their personal or politically-motivated decisions!

Thank you, Doug!

 Hi Doug,

Great article.  I wrote a follow up article on my own pro-EV blog - http://blog.storybridge.org/2009/07/leave-oil-in-ground-drive-electric-with.html - supporting what you say with my own figures.

However - embarrassingly enough - was corrected by one of my readers, and had to go back over my numbers.

I guess I was so swept away by your argument that leaving the oil in the ground would run an electric vehicle on the power used, that I managed to get one of my numbers out by one decimal place.

In any case, after going over the figures many times I just can't reproduce your results.

I get a result that shows leaving the oil in the ground and on the refinery energy saved will allow an EV to go around 15% of the distance that the petrol and diesel from the oil would take ICE vehicles.

That's still an important result at countering the "long tailpipe" argument, and other anti-EV arguments, but its still a long way short of the results you talk about.

Can you give a bit more detail on your numbers?

Thanks

Sarah Smith

(ps I'll send you a quick email as well)

The "refinery electric purchases" data from other states may not include oil extraction and pumping operations.  You can't refine it without pumping and transporting it, not to mention finding it in the first place.  The oil exploration industry is very costly, and not quantied in the energy per gallon at all.

Also, it's possible refineries in other states produce their own power, which would come from burning petroleum products and would not show up on the "purchased power" number, but would come from crude oil that never makes it to "refined products".  This is still energy that comes from the original barrel of oil.  Like shale oil, the total energy in the ground is much larger than that delivered in refined gasoline.

Of course, the other costs, both energy and misery, behind every gallon of gas dwarf the cost of extraction and refining: oil wars, oil diplomacy, oil supertankers, oil fires, oil spills, land use and remediation, the cost of trucking it to the service station, the cost of operating the service station and pumping it into the cars, and so on.  Nor does it include the health damage, the other dimensions of waste from obtaining and burning oil; but let's just look at the energy it takes to extract and refine the oil.
 

I don't trust any other state numbers but California.  Even in California, the ARB, CEC and AQMD divide up the problem so that it's not possible to compute the exact pollution caused by burning one gallon of gasoline.  To get the national figures as a rule of thumb, I multiply California numbers by 9, asssuming that our share of autos and auto driving is 11%.

This is the number I rely upon:

http://www.energy.ca.gov/pier/iaw/industry/petro.html

PETROLEUM EXTRACTION "is an extremely energy intensive process, which uses about 3,700GWh of electricity yearly this is about 1.5%" of total California electric consumption.

PETROLEUM REFINING "is the number one consumer of energy in California's manufacturing sector. In 1997, the industry consumed 7,266 million KWh of electricity and 1,061 million Therms of natural gas. This consumption amounted to 15 and 28 percent of the state's total manufacturing sector's electrical and natural gas consumption respectively."

The numbers are huge; in kWh:

 3,700,000,000 kWh of electric in extraction
 7,300,000,000 kWh of electric in refining
30,000,000,000 kWh of natural gas (1 Therm = 29.3 kWh=100,000BTU)

40,000,000,000 kWh of energy used in the oil extraction and refining industry, appx., and not counting ancillary costs such as water, land, etc.

In california, our cars use about 40 million gallons per day of gasoline, about 1 m bbls. per day or appx. 365 m bbls. per year, or 40,000,000 times 365 gallons per year. 

I don't include diesel refined for other uses.

That's appx.
14,600,000,000 gallons of gas per year burned in California (365*40,000,000).

Dividing the number of kWh by the number of gallons, we get appx:
2.74

Since a gallon contains 35 kWh, that's
7.83%

But the appx. 8% is times the original gallon of crude, so the original 35 kWh per gallon of crude yields 32.26 kWh of energy, so the proportion is really

2.74 divided by 32.26 or 8.49%.

That is, you get less than a gallon of gas from the gallon of crude, so to get the full gallon of gas you have to use more than a gallon of crude, which ups the percentage slightly.

I include an incremental factor of up to 50% because of energy usage hidden by Big Oil, for a total number of:
8% to 12%

For example, Oil Refineries produce immense amounts of all sorts of HxCx compounds, some of which are used to power the refining process itself;
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/8_na_8ph_nus_6a.htm
"...U.S. Refinery Hydrogen Production Capacity as of January 1 (Million Cubic Feet per Day)..."
Some of these energy-rich compounds, like H2, are used in the cracking process, but come from the original influx of crude oil, so really are part of the waste we can never find out without cooperation from the refineries themselves.

So as an informal estimate, I would imagine that the amount of crude that is pulled from the ground is actually 120% or more than that actually used for gasoline, a waste of 20%.

And it might be much higher, depending on where the oil is extracted (for example, if refinery input comes from shale oil products).

These are "ballpark" calculations, in reality, the full cost of each gallon of oil includes far more than energy, and the efficiency of the EV is far more than just its energy costs.

We can power our two EVs just based on our rooftop solar systems; it takes at most 250 kWh to go 1000 miles in an EV, which can be produced by a solar system of 1.3 kW, or no more than 13 square meters.  About the energy used to power two old refrigerators; and we can do it without a burning a drop of oil (of course, plastic comes from oil, and so on, so let's save the oil for important stuff instead of burning it wastefully, just to make money for those who control the oil supply).

Politicians have the best re-election campaigns that corporate sponsors can pay!

 Wll DONE Doug Korthof  ! This article sould be an example also for Europe and all of the world because we all live under the same sky !!!