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Old 11-03-2010, 06:46 PM   #35 (permalink)
NeilBlanchard
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The electricity (and a lot of natural gas too) that gets used to refine petroleum has to be added to the carbon footprint of the resulting gasoline and diesel. So if you were to use it directly to power EV's (or natural gas burning vehicles), then you are using much less carbon, since you use no oil. And, there are many other steps that add to the carbon footprint of oil other than refining...

And 300Wh/mile is a fairly inefficient EV -- 150 to 200Wh/mile (or even lower) is possible. And even our low efficiency generation plants are much more efficient than are ICE's. So, with oil the carbon footprint is very complex and things add up quickly. With electricity, even right now, there is much lower carbon used per BTU than for gasoline -- and it is possible to generate electricity from renewable energy sources, so it can be virtually carbon free.

So, shutting down refineries doesn't power the EV's for as many miles, but those miles are essentially "free" because that carbon is not used to refine the gasoline. If you replace the total miles with more electricity, then the total carbon is lower because of the higher efficiencies of generators and electric motors vs the ICE's you would be replacing. In other words, if you put the energy into electricity, you get more work and/or use less carbon than you do with petroleum.

For example, my plug-in electric lawn mower can run for an hour of heavy duty work for between 0.38kWh and 0.47kWh. This converts to 0.01118 gallons to 0.01382 gallons of gasoline PER HOUR of operation! That is 0.178 - 0.22 cups of gasoline per hour. A gasoline powered lawn mower would probably burn at least 1 pint in an hour, which is 9-11X more.
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