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Hi All:

___I have been beating my head against the table the last few days researching for an answer and I still do not have any solid numbers on. Is anyone reading this associated with the petroleum industry who can verify any of the following?

Left Coast Conversions (http://leftcoastconversions.com/content/view/12/26/)
Did you know that it takes about 12 KWH of electricity just to refine a gallon of gas? An electric car can go farther on the 12 KWH of electricity than the same car on a gallon of gas. Where is the sense in that?

Serial Hybrids Are Here! (http://www.ecoworld.com/blog/2006/11/10/serial-hybrids-are-here/)
Most people don’t realize it requires 12Kw of electrical power to refine one gallon of gasoline.

University of Penn - Energy Audit (http://dolphin.upenn.edu/~pennenv/audit/Energy/index.html)
11 kWh = 1 gallon of gasoline saved(energy)(2)

Gasoline/Emissions (http://evnut.com/emissions.htm) How much electricity does it take to make a gallon of gasoline? We don't know - but here's one stab at it. Ballpark figures only, and NOT a supportable conclusion. The most important message to take away is that it is not trivial! This part of gasoline is ignored by the folks who are concerned about the big impact on our electrical grid if we were to suddenly shift all transportation from gasoline to electricity.

To extract one gallon of gasoline (or equivalent distillate): 9.66 kWh
To refine that gallon: 2.73 kWh additional energy.
Total: 12.39 kWh per gallon.

___If any of the above statements are correct, we (the US) are already self sufficient if in fact we were all driving BEV’s? A BEV can travel ~ 50 miles on the same amount of electricity (11 – 13 kWh) it took to refine a single gallon of gasoline (50 mpg from that gallon of gasoline in a Prius II/HCH-II). I simply have a hard time believing it takes this much electricity to produce a single gallon of gasoline is all?

___I am also making some broad strokes with regards to the trucking industry. There are no BEV solutions for heavy hauling but that may be made up with our own supplies if the rest of the grid were cleared to power BEV’s vs. the same amount of energy needed to refine and distribute gasoline.

___Any help would be appreciated.

___Good Luck

___Wayne

When you think about it in terms of what a kWh means, those figures aren't all that ridiculous. Think about some mundane product that you probably have at home, like a hair dryer. Those things can consume upward of 2,000 watts! That means my girlfriend might use 5 kWh of electricity just to dry her hair in a given month. (Seriously...the bathroom turns into the sauna every time and the rest of the apartment can verge on uncomfortably hot.) That's just to evaporate a little bit of water every morning. Consider that oil has to be pumped from thousands of feet underground and then transported, distilled, cracked, and transported some more before it even gets on the truck. That makes the 10-14kWh per gallon estimate seem pretty good!

The thought that putting our electricity into EVs rather than oil refineries could make us energy independent is pretty astonishing. If the numbers are right then it almost seems criminal that this should be allowed to continue.

Hi Tim:
The thought that putting our electricity into EVs rather than oil refineries could make us energy independent is pretty astonishing. If the numbers are right then it almost seems criminal that this should be allowed to continue.___That is exactly what I was thinking. If we are wasting one energy form to produce another in which the first would have sufficed, why are we doing this? All of the wars, SMOG and GHG emissions, trade and deficit struggles would be for naught. All the while we are forced to ride down a never ending highway of oil dependence? This just does not make any sense given what we have all been through these past 5 + years.

___If you find anything related to the energy numbers quoted above, by all means post it at your earliest convenience. If those numbers are correct, this is the oil industries best kept and most convoluted secrets in the history of the world.

___Good Luck

___Wayne

The reason we are using gasoline is simple: No one has any practical reason for a vehicle that only drives ~150 miles on a single charge. The EV-1 totally proved that it is impractical. Look at me, for example. I drive 40 miles round trip every day. Just how practical is a car that can drive roughly 4 times that distance without recharging?


Seriously now. Coal plants are becoming greener. Natural gas burns cleaner. More wind farms and renewable energy generators are going online every day. Bring on the EVs!

What's interesting here is that that's about the same amount
of propulsive energy we get back out of the gallon. The other
20+ KWh that we *should* be using wisely vanishes as waste heat..
.
Don't tell the hydrogen people, though, they'll all be going like
"see? Gasoline is an energy storage medium!"
.
_H*

Yikes! If that's true the implications are staggering. Of course some oil distillates are treated as products instead of fuels or resources, so it's not very surprising.

Edit- The EPA says
Petroleum refining and distribution efficiency = 0.830

According to the government, maybe 5.7kwh per gallon of gasoline are lost when refining. Sadly, according to the same government, that's enough energy to push an electric pickup (http://avt.inl.gov/pdf/fsev/eva/chvs10.pdf) down the road for 25 miles at 45mph. The electricity requirements may or may not be incorporated in the EPA figure. In any event, talk about conspicuous consumption.

This is a VERY interesting topic. Anybody know the answer for sure? How in the world could you find out? The people who would best know are the ones that produce the gas in the first place and I bet they are not tellin....

Hi Jason:

___My mom used to work for a director of Corporate Engineering of a Fortune 100 who was an absolute engineering genius in a variety of disciplines. She forwarded a link to this thread and although he is in his 80’s now, he is still on top of his game. I hope he can possibly help find the answer to my questions.

___Good Luck

___Wayne

Though not terribly quantitative, there is an editorial piece in the New York Times this morning talking about this issue. I'll link and paste it here.


The End of Ingenuity

Thomas Homer-Dixon, New York Times, November 29th, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/29/opinion/29homerdixon.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=login

MAYBE Malthus was on to something, after all.

First, some background: Twenty-six years ago, in one of the most famous wagers in the history of science, Paul Ehrlich, John Harte and John P. Holdren bet Julian Simon that the prices of five key metals would rise in the next decade. Mr. Ehrlich and his colleagues, all environmental scientists, believed that humankind’s growing population and appetite for natural resources would eventually drive the metals’ costs up. Simon, a professor of business administration, thought that human innovation would drive costs down.

Ten years later, Mr. Ehrlich and his colleagues sent Simon a check for $576.07 — an amount representing the decline in the metals’ prices after accounting for inflation. To many, the bet’s outcome refuted Malthusian arguments that human population growth and resource consumption — and economic growth more generally — would run headlong into the limits of a finite planet. Human inventiveness, stimulated by modern markets, would always trump scarcity.

Indeed, the 1990s seemed to confirm this wisdom. Energy and commodity prices collapsed; ideas (not physical capital or material resources) were the new source of wealth, and local air and water got cleaner — at least in rich countries.

But today, it seems, Mr. Ehrlich and his colleagues may have the last (grim) laugh. The debate about limits to growth is coming back with a vengeance. The world’s supply of cheap energy is tightening, and humankind’s enormous output of greenhouse gases is disrupting the earth’s climate. Together, these two constraints could eventually hobble global economic growth and cap the size of the global economy.

The most important resource to consider in this situation is energy, because it is our economy’s “master resource” — the one ingredient essential for every economic activity. Sure, the price of a barrel of oil has dropped sharply from its peak of $78 last summer, but that’s probably just a fluctuation in a longer upward trend in the cost of oil — and of energy more generally. In any case, the day-to-day price of oil isn’t a particularly good indicator of changes in energy’s underlying cost, because it’s influenced by everything from Middle East politics to fears of hurricanes.

A better measure of the cost of oil, or any energy source, is the amount of energy required to produce it. Just as we evaluate a financial investment by comparing the size of the return with the size of the original expenditure, we can evaluate any project that generates energy by dividing the amount of energy the project produces by the amount it consumes.

Economists and physicists call this quantity the “energy return on investment” or E.R.O.I. For a modern coal mine, for instance, we divide the useful energy in the coal that the mine produces by the total of all the energy needed to dig the coal from the ground and prepare it for burning — including the energy in the diesel fuel that powers the jackhammers, shovels and off-road dump trucks, the energy in the electricity that runs the machines that crush and sort the coal, as well as all the energy needed to build and maintain these machines.

As the average E.R.O.I. of an economy’s energy sources drops toward 1 to 1, an ever-larger fraction of the economy’s wealth must go to finding and producing energy. This means less wealth is left over for everything else that needs to be done, from building houses to moving around information to educating children. The energy return on investment for conventional oil, which provides about 40 percent of the world’s commercial energy and more than 95 percent of America’s transportation energy, has been falling for decades. The trend is most advanced in United States production, where petroleum resources have been exploited the longest and drillers have been forced to look for ever-smaller and ever-deeper pools of oil.

Cutler Cleveland, an energy scientist at Boston University who helped developed the concept of E.R.O.I. two decades ago, calculates that from the early 1970s to today the return on investment of oil and natural gas extraction in the United States fell from about 25 to 1 to about 15 to 1.

This basic trend can be seen around the globe with many energy sources. We’ve most likely already found and tapped the biggest, most accessible and highest-E.R.O.I. oil and gas fields, just as we’ve already exploited the best rivers for hydropower. Now, as we’re extracting new oil and gas in more extreme environments — in deep water far offshore, for example — and as we’re turning to energy alternatives like nuclear power and converting tar sands to gasoline, we’re spending steadily more energy to get energy.

For example, the tar sands of Alberta, likely to be a prime energy source for the United States in the future, have an E.R.O.I. of around 4 to 1, because a huge amount of energy (mainly from natural gas) is needed to convert the sands’ raw bitumen into useable oil.

Having to search farther and longer for our resources isn’t the only new hurdle we face. Climate change could also constrain growth. A steady stream of evidence now indicates that the planet is warming quickly and that the economic impact on agriculture, our built environment, ecosystems and human health could, in time, be very large. For instance, a report prepared for the British government by Sir Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank, calculated that without restraints on greenhouse gas emissions, by 2100 the annual worldwide costs of damage from climate change could reach 20 percent of global economic output.

Humankind’s energy and climate problems are intimately connected. Petroleum’s falling energy return on investment will encourage many economies to burn more coal (which in many parts of the world still has a relatively good E.R.O.I.), but coal emits far more greenhouse-inducing carbon dioxide for every unit of useful energy obtained than other energy sources. Also, many potential solutions to climate change — like moving water to newly arid regions or building dikes and relocating communities along vulnerable coastlines — will require huge amounts of energy.

Without a doubt, mankind can find ways to push back these constraints on global growth with market-driven innovation on energy supply, efficient use of energy and pollution cleanup. But we probably can’t push them back indefinitely, because our species’ capacity to innovate, and to deliver the fruits of that innovation when and where they’re needed, isn’t infinite.

Sometimes even the best scientific minds can’t crack a technical problem quickly (take, for instance, the painfully slow evolution of battery technology in recent decades), sometimes market prices give entrepreneurs poor price signals (gasoline today is still far too cheap to encourage quick innovation in fuel-efficient vehicles) and, most important, sometimes there just isn’t the political will to back the institutional and technological changes needed.

We can see glaring examples of such failures of innovation even in the United States — home to the world’s most dynamic economy. Despite decades of increasingly dire warnings about the risks of dependence on foreign energy, the country now imports two-thirds of its oil; and during the last 20 years, despite increasingly clear scientific evidence regarding the dangers of climate change, the country’s output of carbon dioxide has increased by a fifth.

As the price of energy rises and as the planet gets hotter, we need significantly higher investment in innovation throughout society, from governments and corporations to universities. Perhaps the most urgent step, if humankind is going to return to coal as its major energy source, is to figure out ways of safely disposing of coal’s harmful carbon dioxide — probably underground.

But in the larger sense, we really need to start thinking hard about how our societies — especially those that are already very rich — can maintain their social and political stability, and satisfy the aspirations of their citizens, when we can no longer count on endless economic growth.

Hi Tim:

___That was a really good article and I only wish I could see the hard numbers :( What the article does not take into account is the huge efficiency of driving a BEV on electric alone. I am talking about a Prius heading down the road at 55 - 60 mph at 250 Wh/mile. Far less then this at slower speeds! Even driving an FEH under EV (below 41 mph), I doubt it is consuming more then 225 Wh/mile given the known size of its pack, known useable SoC, and the known distance you can travel under EV from Max to Min SoC. A std. ICE equipped automobile only uses ~ 18% of the energy in a gallon of gas to move it down the road and this is a huge loss vs. an 85 + % efficiency to propel a BEV. I have seen the 18% number in the past but am guessing on the BEV’s for now.

___The BEV’s efficiency is only one part of it. The ability to transport power via wire to your home from the generating station is far more efficient then transporting 15 gallons of fuel to the same ;)

___If you find anything else, please post whatever it is. I even considered making this thread a sticky given it is that important imho.

___Good Luck

___Wayne

Found something! (http://www.energy.ca.gov/releases/2003_releases/2003-10-09_roadmap.html)

In California, refineries are the largest industrial consumers of electricity. Based on year 2000 figures, refineries while converting crude oil to gasoline and other petroleum products, consumed 6.2 gigawatt hours of electricity. They are also the second largest industrial users of natural gas, consuming at least 1.4 billion therms a year.

At maximum production, the state's refineries make more than 44 million gallons of gasoline a day.

From here (http://www.energy.ca.gov/2003_price_spikes/gasoline_exec_sum.html) we produce at most ~365(45x10^6)=about 16 billion gallons of gasoline per year.

6.2 million kwh isn't a whole lot compared to the energy in 16 billion gallons of gas, but 1.4 billion therms is roughly 41 billion kwh of energy, and equates to roughly 20 billion kwh of electricity at the consumer's home if burned in a modern NG power plant. So we have ~20 billion kwh of energy that could be electricity used to process ~537 billion kwh of chemical energy. This is still small compared to the energy in all those gallons of gas, but the difference in EV/ICE efficiency helps close that gap.

A car that on average requires 250wh/mile is fairly common, and usually gets ~25mpg. Since the car only requires ~6kwh to physically do this, but uses ~33.6kwh, it's energy efficiency is roughly 18%. A commercial BEV usually has a controller, motor, and charger that operate at around 90% efficiency individually, so the overall efficiency is ~73%. So in terms of energy efficiency, ~15 billion kwh out of ~20 billion kwh will be used to drive the BEV, while ~97 billion kwh out of ~537 billion kwh of chemical energy will go into driving the same average ICE.

Edit- Everything below this is wrong, see my next post for details.

I think this means that in terms of usable energy, each gallon of gasoline costs what could be 5.2kwh of energy used directly in a BEV. So, the natural gas inputs needed for gasoline refining could directly move an electric car ~20 miles, compared to their use in refining a gallon of gasoline, which could move the same car ~25 miles. The difference obviously being the refining and burning of gasoline pollutes much more than taking the NG needed and burning it for electricity. Of course I'm ignoring the fact that gasoline only represents half of all distillates by volume, and who knows what by energy input, but since we still haven't taken the electricity/NG cost of extraction and distribution into account, it seems reasonable to say that we're doing a good job of robbing Peter to pay Paul, with all the externalities that come with it. :flag: :driveby1:

Excellent find!

Hi Yesplease:

___Great analysis! So if I read into it properly, it appears as if the refineries “all in” consume as much NG to make the gallon as the NG could make in electricity to drive almost the same distance in a BEV (~ 20% short) not including the distillates (a + for the refiners side of the equation) and the transportation of the fuels from the ground to the refinery and from the refinery to the gas station and into our tanks (a – for the refineries)?

___Good Luck

___Wayne

Yikes, I think I double dipped for the gasoline vehicle efficiency. Everything before the last paragraph is o.k., but the last paragraph is wrong. It should be that...

We could use the 1.4 billion therms of NG to make ~20 billion kwh of electricity, of which ~15 billion kwh could go into moving a BEV, and since it requires ~6kwh to go 25 miles, those 15 billion kwh would result in ~63 billion BEV miles. If we used those 1.4 billion therms to make 16 billion gallons of gas, they would move ICE cars 400 billion miles.

So, each gallon of gas requires NG which could otherwise be 1.2kwh of electricity, that could take a BEV ~5 miles. I found this (http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/steo/pub/special/california/june01article/carefinery.html), and it seems that the refinery uses ~8.7kwh per barrel of oil, and a barrel of oil on average makes 19.5 gallons of gas. So in terms of straight electricity, each gallon of gas takes .45kwh, of which .33kwh could go into directly moving the BEV, which moves the miles driven up to ~6.3.

I found this (http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/reports/exxon_emissions_study.pdf) while googling.

Refinery operations: U.S. refineries purchased 34.7 billion kWh and delivered 6.31 billion barrels of oil products in 2002, giving an electricity consumption rate of 5.51 kWh per barrel refined. To account for electricity consumed in pipeline operations, gas processing plants, and related uses, we increase this factor to from 5.51 to 7.00 kWh per barrel of oil products marketed as an estimate of ExxonMobil’s total upstream electricity consumption.

Which adds another third of a mile, so we're at ~6.6 miles. If the average well depth is 4000ft, and extraction costs .2kwh per barrel moved 1000ft, then a barrel costs .8kwh to get out of the ground, which adds another .2 miles, making the total ~6.5 miles. This is the one portion that's very flaky, since all the other energy inputs admittedly come from commercial sources, while this could be powered by diesel, LPG, NG, etc...

Something else I stumbled on is the energy cost of oil shale (http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/7/6/0472/48972) and the like.

The authors then looked at the process that Shell is developing, and anticipate that the costs will be in the $20 - $30 per barrel range, and that there is a potential for a supply of 3 million barrels a day. They see the cost of the oil being in the range of 250 - 300 kwh per barrel, producing a pumpable clean crude.

Which, if true, would add a 14kwh per gallon of gasoline penalty, and alternatively power a BEV for ~42 miles. So oil shale is definitely a no go.

But back to the industrial energy inputs for oil, it doesn't seem as it's as electricity intensive as I had (erroneously) though it was. But... there is tons I don't know about refining. For instance, gasoline production may be way more energy intensive than other distillates, so the energy per gallon of gasoline may very well be higher than average, and higher than the ~1.6kwh per gallon of gas. This may very well be the case, since I found this little line from an edu address.

These were all related to the energy costs per barrel of oil produced (78.1 kWh per barrel of oil).

Which may or may not apply, since I'm not sure about the context. If taken literally, it would imply that each gallon (19.5) of gas from a barrel of crude requires 4kwh, which could take a BEV ~16 miles. What we really need in order to come to a definitive answer is how much energy gasoline requires compared to other distillates.

O.k. I found (http://www.energy.ca.gov/pier/iaw/industry/petro.html) what I'm looking for. I'm surprised Darell didn't simply link the ca.gov site instead of using a word doc. But, back on topic, CA produces roughly 300 bbpy, and

Annually, the oil extraction industry uses 3,846 million KWh of electricity 2,910 million Therms of gas.

Which corresponds to about 8kwh/gallon of gasoline that could be electricity at the consumers home. Add another ~kwh/gallon due to refining

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.

And we're at 9kwh/gallon of gasoline, all in. Of course the actual amount is lower since we get other products as well, I'm guessing somewhere are 6kwh/gallon since it suits my needs, but in reality I'd need to know how much energy each distillate requires compared to the others to be sure. But, in any event, it seems like we're using electricity/NG in order to use oil, when we could simply use the electricity/NG directly in a BEV for the same result. Combine this with this (http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/12/arizona_public_.html#more) and we're in business. We could probably have a fleet of biofueled hybrids with little pollution and a fraction of the GHG emissions.

O.k. I found (http://www.energy.ca.gov/pier/iaw/industry/petro.html) what I'm looking for. I'm surprised Darell didn't simply link the ca.gov site instead of using a word doc.
Howdy... I should probably put the link in as well. The reason I use text that I can store locally? Because I'm sick of having links off-page that get changed! There's no way to keep up with what everybody else in the world does with their sites. So whenever I can, I point to a local copy of something that's important.

Just thought I'd register to clear that up. ;) I see some familiar faces here... a friend pointed out this thread to me since I'd been referenced. Howdy... and continue on. This mysterious question has haunted me for many years. Would love to have a defesible number to toss out when needed. Keep at it!