Quote:
Originally Posted by RobertSmalls
The issue is that Llewellyn has developed a near-religious belief that shuttering refineries will by itself be sufficient to power a fleet of electric cars. I have not found data to support that thesis. In fact, I have provided sufficient data in other threads to refute it.
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I’ve never worked through it myself so here goes:
Looking at the Process Fuel Use in table 1, we have to throw out LPG, Fuel Oil, Still Gas, Coke, and Other because are Refinery outputs that are feed back in as process fuels or in the case of “other” we don’t know what they are. Purchased steam is a tough one. It is probably made from waste heat, which then we can neglect it but if natural gas is used to make the steam then we have assign an energy value to it. I just don’t know one way or the other. There are a lot of refinery inputs in Table 2 but I think that we should neglect those too because if we’re going to use crude and others to make electricity to power EVs then we should just make gasoline to power ICEs.
That leaves us with Natural Gas, Coal, and Electricity from Table 1:
So, if you can believe the internet then it takes 10 cubic feet of Nat Gas to produce 1kWhr of electricity, and 1.2 lbs of coal to produce 1kWhr (I found other figures too but tried to aim for the midpoint.)
From Nat Gas: 71.05TWhr
From Coal: 0.0717TWhr
Electricity: 42.682TWhr
Total: 113.8037TWhr
If an EV gets 300Whr/mile it can travel 379 billion miles.
From table 2 we can calculate Gasoline production of 131 billion gallons.
Average mileage for US fleet passenger cars is 22.6mpg so can travel almost 3 trillion miles. Dang…
so shutting down the oil refineries won’t provide enough electricity to power EV the same number of miles.
Of course this is only looking at the energy input to the refinery. It’s neglecting getting crude from the well to refinery and from refinery to pump. It also neglects the environmental impact of oil spills, down stream refinery pollution, etc, which other people have discussed on this thread.
I’m still very proEV. They should be an important part of the transportation solution. Gasoline should be used more efficiently too.