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Citylab forgets an important factor: the electricity consumption of oil refineries. Almost all of it goes to making “branchy” isomers needed for gasoline, or t

Citylab forgets an important factor: the electricity consumption of oil refineries. Almost all of it goes to making “branchy” isomers needed for gasoline, or things like hydro desulfurization. Reduce the demand for gasoline and diesel, and now you have surplus electricity, which so happens to be more per gallon than the equivalent electrical energy in a gge of EV usage. This isn’t a panacea- if you don’t have refineries in the area, and/or their power can’t be fed to the grid, you might have a problem. California and Texas are solid, though.

reitzensteinm 8y ago
I tried looking, and couldn't find anywhere close to a source that says that refining gasoline consumes so much electricity you'd get more mileage using it to power a BEV. Do you have something
- mchannon 8y ago
  This page, although a bit sloppy maybe, has a lot of referenced links in it that should help you find what you're looking for: https://greentransportation.info/energy-transportation/gasoline-costs-6kwh.html https://greentransportation.info/energy-transportation/gasol...
  - reitzensteinm 8y ago
    Yeah, that was one place I looked. But the only credible linked calculation had it at 0.2, not 6. The others seem to conflate energy with electricity consumption (it doesn't at all surprise me that the process uses a lot of energy, just the supposed electrical consumption). Further, the back of the napkin just doesn't work out. The US refines 18.5 million barrels a day (for 2012 from WP), or 283 billion gallons a year. This implies 1698 billion kWh of consumption out of 4015 billion kWh total electrical production, or more than the total which is used by industry (one third). You seemed to know what you were talking about which is why I asked for a source... I have a very hard time believing it's even within an order of magnitude of the correct figure.
    - mchannon 8y ago
      Although I'm finding it hard to find confirmation (or denial), I believe refineries have captive power plants as part of their operations, which are effectively isolated from the grid, and kept out of aggregate electricity generation statistics (they always seem to call it "net electricity" for some reason and maybe this is part of why).
      - reitzensteinm 8y ago
        But those captive power plants would have to add up to be a third of the capacity of the power plants on the main grid - that's a huge amount. If the process uses a lot of heat, and you're why wouldn't you just skip the electricity generation and use the thermal energy directly? So presumably the electrical consumption to the extent it exists is for a more sophisticated use than that. I would suggest (in the absence of other evidence) the government report linked above is correct - that it's relatively efficient in terms of electricity consumption, but not in terms of overall energy consumption.
        mchannon 8y ago
        Check out http://www.iaee.org/documents/denver/varela-salazar.pdf http://www.iaee.org/documents/denver/varela-salazar.pdf Texas has 2GW of refinery cogen capacity alone.
        reitzensteinm 8y ago
        According to the numbers in that document, that's equivalent to 0.46 kWh per gallon. It also notes: "The comparison of both graphics suggests that refineries in Texas have excess capacity in many cases" Compared to a "typical requirement". The slope of the line for "typical requirement" is 0.22 kWh per gallon. This either means Texan refineries are atypically inefficient, or they sell power back to the grid or shut down their power plants. Either way, we're still an order of magnitude away from the 6 kWh/gallon figure, and from sources that look fairly credible.

reitzensteinm 8y ago

I tried looking, and couldn't find anywhere close to a source that says that refining gasoline consumes so much electricity you'd get more mileage using it to power a BEV. Do you have something

mchannon 8y ago
This page, although a bit sloppy maybe, has a lot of referenced links in it that should help you find what you're looking for: https://greentransportation.info/energy-transportation/gasoline-costs-6kwh.html https://greentransportation.info/energy-transportation/gasol...
- reitzensteinm 8y ago
  Yeah, that was one place I looked. But the only credible linked calculation had it at 0.2, not 6. The others seem to conflate energy with electricity consumption (it doesn't at all surprise me that the process uses a lot of energy, just the supposed electrical consumption). Further, the back of the napkin just doesn't work out. The US refines 18.5 million barrels a day (for 2012 from WP), or 283 billion gallons a year. This implies 1698 billion kWh of consumption out of 4015 billion kWh total electrical production, or more than the total which is used by industry (one third). You seemed to know what you were talking about which is why I asked for a source... I have a very hard time believing it's even within an order of magnitude of the correct figure.
  - mchannon 8y ago
    Although I'm finding it hard to find confirmation (or denial), I believe refineries have captive power plants as part of their operations, which are effectively isolated from the grid, and kept out of aggregate electricity generation statistics (they always seem to call it "net electricity" for some reason and maybe this is part of why).
    - reitzensteinm 8y ago
      But those captive power plants would have to add up to be a third of the capacity of the power plants on the main grid - that's a huge amount. If the process uses a lot of heat, and you're why wouldn't you just skip the electricity generation and use the thermal energy directly? So presumably the electrical consumption to the extent it exists is for a more sophisticated use than that. I would suggest (in the absence of other evidence) the government report linked above is correct - that it's relatively efficient in terms of electricity consumption, but not in terms of overall energy consumption.
      - mchannon 8y ago
        Check out http://www.iaee.org/documents/denver/varela-salazar.pdf http://www.iaee.org/documents/denver/varela-salazar.pdf Texas has 2GW of refinery cogen capacity alone.
        reitzensteinm 8y ago
        According to the numbers in that document, that's equivalent to 0.46 kWh per gallon. It also notes: "The comparison of both graphics suggests that refineries in Texas have excess capacity in many cases" Compared to a "typical requirement". The slope of the line for "typical requirement" is 0.22 kWh per gallon. This either means Texan refineries are atypically inefficient, or they sell power back to the grid or shut down their power plants. Either way, we're still an order of magnitude away from the 6 kWh/gallon figure, and from sources that look fairly credible.