[roflwaffle]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

Can you confirm/deny/correct these numbers?

Confirm and correct.
Here's the data for the energy used in extraction and 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.

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

For 1997, oil production was 340,362,443 bbls (2nd chart), and oil refining was about 650,000,000 bbls. Plug and chug to get the kWh of electricity and therm of natural gas per gallon of oil. Nat gas baseload electricity production is ~50-55% efficient and transmission is ~97% efficient IIRC.

What I didn't include originally was the process efficiency, which according to Robert is 83%, so increase all the values by that (1/.83). On top of that, the oil industry flares a lot of natural gas so that would increase the usable energy for EVs. Back of the pad indicates this was another ~1kWh/gallon of crude as of 2007. Last but not least there's the fuel needed to run the tankers and tanker trucks (Distribution), which is an unknown AFAIK.

Originally Posted by RobertSmalls

This is an unfair comparison. An "average" person driving an electric midsized sedan or SUV at 75mph with the A/C on would not be getting 125-250Wh/mi. If you wanted a fair comparison, the best we have available would probably be a Prius (or a PHEV converted Insight or Tahoe?) driven in EV mode, versus the same car driven the same speed on gasoline.

The only fair comparison involves the FTP75/LA4/J1634 AFAIK. No one has tested EVs and their production counterparts on something like the US06. Using a converted PHEV as a metric for an EV isn't fair either because hybrids have certain design constraints and aren't exactly optimized to function as pure EVs. One of the few decent comparisons I've found is for the older RAV-4. 235Wh/mile in EV mode, plus charging losses, compared to the gas version at 26mpg over the same drive cycle. That's ~400Wh/mile for the old LA version and probably ~250Wh/mile given current battery tech versus +/-1400Wh/mile for the gasser depending on the engine (1996 version or current, which is likely lower)

Originally Posted by RobertSmalls

If refining took more energy in than it put out, people would stop doing it. But until contradicted by citation of better sources, I'm going to stick with the DoE's numbers, as I mentioned here: 83% efficient.

Everything takes more energy in to it than is put out, but people still do everything. The point is that we can't use crude oil as is, so even if we only get out 83% of the energy in the crude, it's in usable forms.