jkirkebo
Model S P85+ VIN 14420 EU
Have you got any data to back that up? Several recent threads have shown it's nothing like double. A US DOE study put refinery losses at 17%.
The loss means 17% less output than input, not directly related to CO2 emissions. I have an example from Norway, all calculations in metric:
Mongstad refinery (a pretty efficient one) releases 10.1 million tonnes CO2 per year and processes 10 million tonnes of oil. So 1.01kg CO2 for 1kg oil produced. 17% loss means 1010 grams of CO2 for 0,83 kg of petrol (or diesel or any other product), which is just over a litre for petrol. Let's say 1000 grams per litre.
Burning that litre produces 2320 grams of CO2. So the refining adds a little less than 50% to that amount. But the Co2-emissions for Mongstad does not take into account that it also draws 550MWh of electricity from the grid each year. If that was from coal, it would add about 6% to the emissions.
This is just refining. Pumping the stuff in the north sea and transporting it to the refinery also has quite a large CO2-footprint, the oil platforms runs on inefficient gas turbines and do a lot of flaring too.
So maybe double is a bit much, but it's pretty close. For oil sands, you can multiply by much more, and oil sands is the maginal producer now because of cost. You can argue that all petrol comes from the oil sands if all EV electricity comes from coal. And with less efficient refineries and transporttation from far away it could easily exceed double anyway.
I haven't included transportation from refinery to petrol station since the grid also have transmission losses.
Last edited: