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Old 10-31-2011, 11:46 AM   #73 (permalink)
NeilBlanchard
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A lot of electricity is used all through the process of finding oil, producing oil, transporting oil, refining oil, storing and transporting fuel -- all of these steps use electricity. Some of those steps also use a lot of natural gas, too.

And also with various types of crude, the amount of energy input vs the fuel output means that the exact amount of the electricity used is hard to know exactly. The article doesn't use an estimate of the full process -- exploration and unproductive test wells add to the overhead, and extraction energy is a very low number even for fairly average crude. Heavy sour crude uses a lot more energy to extract, and the tar sands use FAR more energy to extract than the "average" crude. The large amount of water used in some crude extraction has to be pumped up from underground, and this energy is not trivial. And the natural gas that is used to heat water to both extract heavy sticky crude out of the ground, and to wash the sand out of the tar sand -- also has to be fracked -- which uses, guess what? Lots more water and lots more energy to just get the natural gas so it can then be used to extract this low quality "oil".

Building pipelines and super tankers takes a lot of energy. Operating pipelines and supertankers takes a lot of energy. And we cannot forget the energy used to provide all the oil and other materials used to maintain the operation of an ICE; that are not required for an EV. Balancing this on an EV is energy to recycle the battery pack.

As time goes on, this equation continues to move in favor of EV's. And we do not have to use our military to defend our sources of renewable energy, used to make electricity.
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