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How far could an EV go on the energy used to produce a gallon of gas?

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How far could an EV go on the energy used in a gallon of gas?

What is the point of this thread? It's both irrelevant (we don't make gasoline from electricity and there are very few gasoline powered electrical power plants in the world) and frankly not very interesting as a theoretical discussion either.
 
So the claim is that 10 gallons of oil or gasoline, with a cash value of about $30, is used to generate 85 kWh of electricity, which is then sold by the utility for about $10. I wonder how utilities make a profit at that rate? Are they subsidized?
 
The oil sands are even worse... far worse:

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/2...tment-eroi-natural-gas-in-situ-dilbit-bitumen

"The average "energy returned on investment," or EROI, for conventional oil is roughly 25:1. In other words, 25 units of oil-based energy are obtained for every one unit of other energy that is invested to extract it.
But tar sands oil is in a category all its own.
Tar sands retrieved by surface mining has an EROI of only about 5:1, according to research released Tuesday. Tar sands retrieved from deeper beneath the earth, through steam injection, fares even worse, with a maximum average ratio of just 2.9 to 1. That means one unit of natural gas is needed to create less than three units of oil-based energy."

Using gasoline as a vehicle fuel, there are a lot of losses when you consider there are 33-34KWh in a gallon of gasoline and you only get about 25-30 miles out of that gas on average. The most efficient ICE cars get around 50 miles/gal and many SUVs get less than 20. That same 33KWh will get you around 100 miles in a Model S and a bit further in a Roadster.

But just as a caveat, the energy waste with steam injection isn't quite as bad as it looks. I don't know what they are doing in the Bakan which is in states with virtually no laws regulating oil production (with the problems that come from that). Steam injection was pioneered in California's oil fields and the state has strict environmental laws that the oil companies have to comply with. The oil companies came up with an ingenious idea that reuses waste products to do steam injection. With all oil wells, water is produced with the oil and something needs to be done with it. As an oil field gets older, the water produced is often more than the oil. Natural gas is also produced with oil production, but if there are no pipelines to move the gas away, it is vented to the atmosphere as flares which can be seen from space in the Bakan.

In the California oil fields, they separate out the water and natural gas, then use the natural gas to heat the water to steam, run the steam through an electric generator to produce electricity on the grid, then inject the steam into the wells to soften the oil. They call is cogen. The emissions are on par with a natural gas power plant. And waste products that are disposed of without any use elsewhere does some good. I believe the city of Bakersfield gets almost all its electricity from cogen plants out in the middle of the oil fields.

I don't know what exactly they are doing in the Bakan, but since they are flaring most of the natural gas, I doubt they are doing anything as efficient as California is.

I'm not saying oil production isn't wasteful. There are many places energy is wasted and consumed in the process of getting that oil from the ground into your tank. Electricity can be much simpler.

So the claim is that 10 gallons of oil or gasoline, with a cash value of about $30, is used to generate 85 kWh of electricity, which is then sold by the utility for about $10. I wonder how utilities make a profit at that rate? Are they subsidized?

Very few places in the world use oil to produce electricity and gasoline is usually only used for temporary generators because it is about the most expensive way to generate electricity. Hawaii is the only US state still using mostly oil to produce electricity and it's $0.35 a KWh there. The US national average is $0.12/KWh.
 
I analyzed this exact problem in 2011 and wrote about it in a blog that I haven't touched in years.
Refining | High Speed Charging

The summary: refineries consumed fuel that otherwise could have produced 533 billion kWh ( by consuming it in existing power plants ) to produce 137 billion gallons of gasoline. That's about 3.9 kWh per gallon. A Model S can drive about 12 miles on that.
If our entire passenger car fleet were EVs, that energy could drive them ~1500 billion miles, which is half the miles we drive.

That is not the energy in the gasoline. That is just the energy to refine the crude oil and produce gasoline.
 
In the California oil fields, they separate out the water and natural gas, then use the natural gas to heat the water to steam, run the steam through an electric generator to produce electricity on the grid, then inject the steam into the wells to soften the oil. They call is cogen. The emissions are on par with a natural gas power plant. And waste products that are disposed of without any use elsewhere does some good. I believe the city of Bakersfield gets almost all its electricity from cogen plants out in the middle of the oil fields.
I'd like to find out what the energy production looks like from this cogen process at the Kern operation in Bakersfield. They account for 10% of all natural gas consumption in the entire state of California, I highly doubt that equates to efficient(normal) electricity production.
 
I'd like to find out what the energy production looks like from this cogen process at the Kern operation in Bakersfield. They account for 10% of all natural gas consumption in the entire state of California, I highly doubt that equates to efficient(normal) electricity production.

I look at it in the same way we look at burning old fryer oil as biodiesel. It's terribly wasteful to make essentially fry oil just to burn it in a diesel engine, but when you're done with it as a cooking oil using it one last time in an engine is a better use for it than just dumping it in the landfill.

Cogen would probably be a waste of energy if the intent is to generate electricity, but the goal is to do something with the wastewater which would have to otherwise go into a toxic waste dump, and to do something with the gas which is produced in too small a quantity to make it worthwhile to build the pipeline network from each well, and to get the last oil out. It achieves all three goals and gets some electricity out of the deal.

If the primary goal was to produce electricity, there are a lot of better ways to do it. The Lake Isabella dam in the Sierras east of town probably produces more electricity at lower cost and it's completely renewable, though I'm sure this year's electricity output isn't very good with the tiny snowpack.
 
As far as I know, most of the NG cogeneration (at least in CA) used in oil extraction is grid connected, and could be used to generate extra electricity instead of pumping petroleum. I imagine that oil companies sell to the grid when electricity is expensive and buy it back for use in oil production when electricity is inexpensive, but they're also net consumers. We choose to use the electricity for oil extraction, but there's nothing preventing us from using it to power EVs. It's not stranded in any way I can see.

The list below has grid-connected power plants as of 2009. On average, the grid-connected generating capacity of nat gas plants used in oil extraction in CA is ~2MW.
ftp://ftp.consrv.ca.gov/pub/oil/annual_reports/2009/0108rsvs_09.pdf
 
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