My wife is beating me over the head with Ozzie Zehner

[rcc]

Good points made so far.

A few to add:

1) when considering oil/gas costs, think also about the money and lives spent keeping the oil flowing around the world. The US spends billions of dollars a year trying to keep peace in the Middle East to keep oil flowing from the Middle East and traffic flowing through the Suez Canal. Desert Storm (Iraq war #1) happened mostly because enough world leaders were worried that a large % of the world's oil reserves would otherwise fall under the control of an utter lunatic. Imagine would happen if the world's oil consumption dropped enough that we didn't care about oil flowing from the Middle East. Think about the impact, not only on our foreign policy and military budgets but also on the people in the military (and their families) who are stationed/patrolling in those areas who could stay home. Africa is a hell-hole of a continent that most people and countries ignore. The reason we pay attention to the Middle East but tend to ignore Africa is oil.

2) I believe that shifting pollution from many many small point sources (cars) to a few large sources (power plants) is a good thing. It's easier to monitor pollution emissions from power plants so we know how much each plant is polluting. It's possible to retrofit new pollution control technologies onto old power plants (albeit at a cost) whereas for cars, that's just not practical. And as the power grid gets cleaner, everything using the grid automatically gets cleaner.

3) Look at the cost/damage of getting the power to where it's used. It'd be interesting to calculate the environmental damage from transport of oil/gas vs. transmission of electricity. Think pipeline leaks, oil/gas spills, underground tank leaks/contamination, etc. Think about road wear from gas/oil trucks, keeping in mind that it's the trucks that put the vast majority of the wear and tear on the highway infrastructure, not cars. I'd bet that the environmental impact and cost of operating the electric grid is a lot lower than that of moving all that gasoline around.

 

[brianman]

Thank you to all that responded
good stuff (ammo) for the wife
Sorry if the post was a bit redundant

"Honey, I'm unlikely to convince you and I'd rather be doing other things with our time. But if you want to learn from folks that know I can point you to a thread on the forum or print it out for you. These guys know their stuff and I'd just be a lossy filter."

 

[Dan5]

Yep, you are correct, it is iron phosphate in the spark, thought i read that the supplier was LG chem. hard to keep track.

Norwegian study still incorrect, they could not have known iron phosphate was going into a car that was yet to be released and represent it as a typical EV.

One battery chem in they study never used, the other one in a car that was still in development during the time of the paper

 

[richkae]

Table 3-3 of this source shows that 732,397 kWh/d of electricity is used in a 100,000 b/d (4,200,000 gal/d) refinery. That works out to 0.17 kWh of electricity per gallon.
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/special/pdf/california.pdf

Refineries also consume natural gas as a fuel. One could convert this to an equivalent kWh of energy, 0.30 kWh per ft3. In 2012, US refineries consumed 843,228 million ft3 of natural gas as fuel while processing 5,580,035,000 b of crude. That works out to 1.1 kWh/gal; around half of this value could be produced as electricity if the natural gas was used in power plants instead of fuel in oil refineries.
U.S. Fuel Consumed at Refineries
U.S. Refinery Receipts of Crude Oil by Method of Transportation

From here:
U.S. Fuel Consumed at Refineries
Total up all the energy inputs I get 3.44*10^15 btu
( petroleum coke and still gas are much bigger components of the energy used than natural gas, and the actual electricity used is only 4.5% of the energy input )
Thats 619,000 btu per barrel refined ( dividing by 5,580,035,000 )
Thats the energy equivalent of 180kWh ( not saying that could produce 180kWh - just that it is the energy equivalent )
If you get 20.5 gallons of gasoline from each barrel - thats 8.8kWh per gallon of gasoline.

 

[CalDreamin]

From here:
U.S. Fuel Consumed at Refineries
Total up all the energy inputs I get 3.44*10^15 btu
( petroleum coke and still gas are much bigger components of the energy used than natural gas, and the actual electricity used is only 4.5% of the energy input )
Thats 619,000 btu per barrel refined ( dividing by 5,580,035,000 )
Thats the energy equivalent of 180kWh ( not saying that could produce 180kWh - just that it is the energy equivalent )
If you get 20.5 gallons of gasoline from each barrel - thats 8.8kWh per gallon of gasoline.

Your total energy number and energy per barrel looks about right.
The total energy of the petroleum coke that is burned (mostly in FCCUs) and the natural gas burned are about the same, while the still gas burned produces about 50% more total energy than either one of those.

Still gas and petroleum coke burned in refineries are made from the crude oil in the refinery, they are not external energy sources like electricity and natural gas. Another way to look at it, the energy sources in oil refining consist of a small portion of the crude oil that gets burned (mostly as still gas and pet coke), natural gas, and electricity.

These numbers are averages. Heavier and/or more sour crudes require more energy to process than lighter and/or sweeter crudes. Unconventional crudes that are extremely heavy like Canadian oil sands require more energy to process than conventional crudes.

We can't ascribe all of the 180 kWh/b energy consumed in the average oil refinery to just one of the products made -- gasoline. The production of diesel fuel, jet fuel, kerosene, home heating oil, LPG, petroleum coke, heavy fuel oil, asphalt, lubricating oils, petrochemical feedstocks, and other products also requires a big portion of that energy. The 180 kWh/b total energy is 4.3 kWh/gal of crude. ANL estimates a relative energy intensity of 1.28 for making gasoline (I think their analysis may be a bit out of date, and may not take into account how energy intensive it is to make ultralow sulfur diesel, let alone the even more energy intensive CARB diesel). But using the ANL number, that gets us to 5.5 kWh/gal of gasoline.
greet.es.anl.gov/files/hl9mw9i7‎

Getting back to the original point, the claim of ~7 kWh required to produce a gallon of gasoline is in the right ballpark if one is talking about ALL energy sources. But this value often gets misrepresented as the electricity used, when as you point out, only 4.5% of the energy in oil refining is in the form in electricity. About 25% of the energy consumed in oil refining comes from burning natural gas, 4.5% comes from electricity, and the rest comes from (indirectly) burning a small portion of the crude oil processed in refining.

 

[ModelS4Taos]

Thanks for the clarification on which part of energy sources are external. Its what makes these discussions is fun and its good to be accurate.

I think rather than focusing on the electricity that refineries use which is a relativity small amount, we should be focusing on the massive amount of energy used in all the processes not directly used to power the car. To be fair we should also do the same for electricity used in electric cars (I assume this process is more efficient).

If anyone has good info on the how efficient electricity generation is please chime in here. Would love to know what percentage of power stations recapture heat to "re-drive" the generators that make the electricity.

 

[dsm363]

Isn't the main point that roughly 7 kWh is needed to produce a gallon of gas comes almost entirely from non-green sources of energy and doesn't go into actually moving the car forward? That also applies to EVs but the national grid mix seems to be cleaner than what goes on at the refineries. Exact numbers would be helpful. Basically, about 7 kWh of electricity is needed (from whatever sources of energy) to make a gallon of gas and the car hasn't moved an inch with that energy from the pollution created. The pollution from the tailpipe once that gallon of gas is consumed is on top of the production pollution. Once the pollution is done at the powerplant to create 7 kWh of electricity, it can move a Model S about 20 miles or so.

 

[JRP3]

Isn't the main point that roughly 7 kWh is needed to produce a gallon of gas comes almost entirely from non-green sources of energy and doesn't go into actually moving the car forward? That also applies to EVs but the national grid mix seems to be cleaner than what goes on at the refineries. Exact numbers would be helpful.

Coal plants are about 30% efficient, NG ranges from around 40% to 60% for combined cycle, and efficiency doesn't really apply to hydro, nuclear, wind, solar, etc. Transmission losses are around 7%.

Basically, about 7 kWh of electricity is needed (from whatever sources of energy) to make a gallon of gas and the car hasn't moved an inch with that energy from the pollution created.

No, see the previous discussions. It's energy, most of it in the form of heat, and mostly from petroleum by products, which would not exist if we weren't drilling for and extracting oil. Even if they were available you would not get the full 7kWh's of electricity from them because of the aforementioned efficiency losses in electrical power generation, you'd probably get less than half.
What would be interesting is to look at directly burning a less refined crude oil product directly in a generating plant to charge an EV. Bunker oil might be the least refined fuel possible, I think it's a step below fuel oil, I don't know. Instead of wasting more energy to refine it into diesel or gasoline just burn it as is. I don't know how well a lesser refined oil product would work in a generating plant or what sort of efficiency you might get.