Norbert
TSLA will win
One word:
averages
Please elaborate. How would you convert steam average into kWh ?
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One word:
averages
Valero building solar and wind farms to meet the 50MW (!) power needs of their Sunray, TX refinery.
It's just for looking green. The power from all those renewable contributors is enough to keep the lights on.
It tilts the environmental benefits equation so heavily in favor of EV's that the anti-EV enviro arguments will wither and die.
It's an interesting reaction when you tell people it takes electricity to make gasoline, they often seem deflated, along with their arguments :biggrin:
The long tail pipe argument just isn't what perhaps to some it seems to be.
But you already know that. Thanks for reading.
Of course with my solar panels, I have the ultimate long tailpipe. It's 93 million miles long!
If you really want to do some calculations using total electricity use, try the folowing:
Here you get an idea of consumption of Californian refineries: Electricity Shortage in California: Issues for Petroleum and Natural Gas SupplyNow as an example, I took Torrance (Los Angeles), the first refinery listed in the above report, with 160 mbpsd (kilobarrels per stream-day).
I assumed that this particular refinery produces about 20% of its intake as gasoline (without checking the figure for this refinery):
Using the 94MW listed and 24 hours operation: 94*24=2256 MWh per stream day
Output 160*42*0.2=1344 thousands of Gallons (US) of gasoline per stream day.
Resulting in about 1.7 kWh per gal of gasoline.
I think Nissan, as well as all of us, should be careful not to say, "It takes 7.5kWh of electricity to refine a gallon of gasoline", and instead say, "It takes 7.5kWh of energy to refine a gallon of gasoline". Then go on to say that our cars can go 25-30 miles on that same amount of energy.
Alfred's info makes it clear as to why.
Our point remains valid, as refineries still get their energy from fossil fuels primarily, and electricity from the grid secondarily.
To focus solely on the electricity would be more for the fun of the argument. I do think the more relevant number is the energy used to refine a gallon of gas, as Tdave suggests:
According to this apparently careful study:
http://www.transportation.anl.gov/m...dfs/energy_eff_petroleum_refineries-03-08.pdf
The energy used to refine a gallon of gas is around 10% of the energy content of the crude oil used in refining it. Of course one has to consider that this produces not only gas, but also diesel and other products. It seems in the US, at the top production level, gas and diesel are the driving factors. If one distributes the 10% energy input on gas and diesel, without doing the exact numbers, I think one gets quite close to the number which Nissan has made public. The energy used to produce the gas would have to be added.
Excellent find! The report also shows how hydrogen short those refineries are! The benefit in energy terms of reducing then the gasoline share should be very noticeable, but as i said before: You have to run the LP models to find realistic figures.
10% of the energy content of the crude oil used in refining it.
I believe this number used to be 100 to 1. That's it's now 10 to 1 may be largely a function of the difficulty of finding new crude sources -- we have to use more energy to find them. It's a compelling number, but I don't know that the increase also means more energy to refine a gallon of gasoline, unless perhaps it also reflects more usage of lower quality crude.