How much electricity does an oil refinery use?

True, although you may have heard me say it (Oil) is clean burning, practical, economic, energy effiecient, I never implied endless supply. On August 26, 2011 world pop = 7,000,000,000. Yikes!

 

It's significantly less. There's only a handful of states in the same ballpark and a couple states significantly lower thanks to lots of hydro or nuclear.

I haven't verified the chart on this page, but in the comments it does state how they generated the chart using EIA data.

CO2 Emissions per Electrical Energy Unit (kgCO2/kWh) by US State | The Power Factor

 

Arguments could be made against clean burning, practical, and economic; however, energy efficient is not something you can apply to generic burning of a fuel. Where, when, and how are the important things.

The real 'advantage' of oil is that it a legacy of hundreds of millions of years of work by others, that we can steal. We are burning it basically a million years of accumulation every year. From a certain point of view that looks great. From a viewpoint 200 years in the future we are going to look like robber barons unparalleled.

By the way, that 7,000,000,000 is a consequence of oil, so include that in your costs.

 

I am ready to sum up. Grump asked "how much elec does refinery use." I said small amount elec needed since oil can be considered "ready made". DarellDD said a humongous amount elec needed, and his web page quotes it needs 7.5 KWhr per gallon. This is a huge number which, if correct, suggests much of the elec power generated by the world goes mostly into refining oil. DarellDD said his source was old Nissan data, but Nissan has stopped using this number. Both DarrelDD and Grumpy said they were inclined to agree with the old Nissan data anyhow. They both feel that the *apparent* huge amount elec needed by refineries means we just need to shut down refineries and divert all that elec power instead to EVs.

This forced me to check the Nissan calculation with basic DOE data for USA: USA refineries purchase 125 Millon KWhr per day electric and process 800 million gallons oil per day. This is 0.16 KWhr per gallon, and not the 7.5 number Nissan once quoted. It further appears Nissan was off by a factor of 42 gal/bbl, i.e.; they made a math error. That is probably why they Nissan no longer shows this erroneous number.

I trust I am helping pro-EV folks here by showing some factual errors being used in the arguments on PC. Maybe if there were less bias and political rhetoric, it would help all of us adopt EV.

 

Concur...

 

These ridiculous assumptions render your conclusion highly questionable.

 

There is no concrete way to nail down this number. All we can do is ball-park it. Do we stop at the refinery? How about trucking it out to the gas stations? Then powering those gas stations 24/7 so it can be pumped into our cars. Do we account for the energy used in exploring for the oil? Initially pumping it out of the ground (almost always electric pumps).

And then there's what you bring up here - that refineries make their own power. And some use NG, of course. So the only thing we can really do is call it "energy input" to pull oil out, transport it, refine it, deliver it. If we pretend that we could turn off the oil industry today (the part the fuels transportation) and we got to keep not the energy in the oil we aren't using, but only the energy that went into making that gasoline available at the pump (no matter WHERE it came from) I think we'll find that an EV can travel about as far on that energy as an ICE could travel on the actual gasoline that is not being used in this hypothetical situation.

Does that make sense? It is the only point that I really try to make. Delivering gasoline takes a huge amount of energy (from well to cars' gas tank). If that energy were instead stuffed into EV batteries, we could travel about as far without actually burning the gasoline. Yes, that is WAY too simple, but it gets us in the ballpark.

 

Wow. You've apparently heard me say way more than I've said. We seem to have a disconnect here. My page contains information to help with this project. Information that I've spent lots of time on. Information that isn't all supportable. Its accuracy depends on the sources and assumptions, and the "facts" in the matter are all over the map. You are talking about "electricity to refine" and making it sound like that's what *I* am talking about as well. And while I agree that's the subject of this thread, I contend that we need to go WAYYYY wider and deeper than that to come up with relevant information. We can't just look at the electricity input (because there are many energy inputs that total up to a much bigger number, and those other energy inputs *could* be used to make electricity, yes?). And the refining process is just one part of the oil system. Let's go from well to the tank, add up all the energy and see where this ends up.

I have no axe to grind here. I would LOVE to know these numbers. And after many years of searching, it is still a mystery. Here's what I want to know, and what I wish the title of the thread was:

How many kWh of energy (no matter the form or source) is used to provide gasoline to an automobile's fuel tank?

 

Right.

Nope, not even close for the cars I use for the comparison, a Prius and a LEAF, in a plant-wheels analysis.

This is the calc I am interested in too, and I agree that WtW is a hard number to come by. Anybody know how much energy it takes to mine coal ? To (somewhat) clean up the mess afterwards ? to deal with ashe lakes ? Or for that matter the environmental cost of oil spills ? WtW is only a partial answer too, but it is one place to start.

 

Just a guess on my part, but I think Nissan pulled its 7 kwh/gallon refining number because this is energy input, not electricity input. Since most of this energy is NatGas, I suppose one could say: lets turn the NG into electricity for the grid. At best this would be about 60% of 7 kwh if a combined CHP plant was onsite, at least about 30% of 7 kwh minus costs of transport.

 

Per mile, the energy required to fuel your car either by gas or by electricity is about the same. Is that what you said?

I think there's a ways to go with the gas/EV debate, but let's try to get this far first.

 

Ah yes. So much effort into collecting those links... and I have no control over other sites removing or just moving the info. Thanks for the reminder to check them. I've removed a lot of them now, sadly.

 

Here's the soundbite: It takes as much energy to fill your tank as it does to charge your bank.

 

Ultimately, if you could factor all elements in (amortize the build cost of the Colorado Dam ... health issue of fossil fuel burned, a percentage of military ... etc) to the equasion, you STILL can not get an exact amount, of electricity used at refineries. The cost of fuel is continually in a state of flux. After all, refineries run fuel costs that varry with the age / size of the fuel deposit. 70 - 80 years ago, some of the giant wells that are still pumping today, were on natural pressure long ago. Now days,there are HUGE amounts of energy used ... pumping pressure into the ground, to squeeze out more energy. Thus, the costs keep going up. Miles deep wells off shore now need to be tapped, because the easy places have already been tapped. And the freezing cold northern areas are now being looked at. Those costs (and their ultimate spills) continue to drive up the cost of the junk we make electricity from. So even if the number was right today, it'd be wrong in a few weeks.

.

 

When looking at oil, it's very important to look at the EROI.

Looks like oil shale is typically only around 2:1. Very poor compared to the ~20:1 for typical conventional crude.

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2010/08/shale-20100803.html

Since we get a lot of our oil from Canada (oil shale), it'd be very interesting to know what the average EROI for the oil we burn is...

 

Right! But with the caveat that the EV then doesn't have to burn anything nor make any more pollution to actually move down the road once the "tank" is full... while the ICE still has to burn the gas to move. That's an important little bit of the puzzle! So yeah... I contend that it takes about the same amount of energy (per mile) to fill the tank of an ICE or of an EV. But a full tank doesn't get us down the road!

The only thing we know for certain is that it gets worse every day/month/year. Oil used to just bubble up out of the ground. Now we have to go hunting for it - way deep, out in the ocean, from shale (!), etc. What was once basically a "windfall" energy is now.... not. Solar and wind on the other hand - much closer to that ideal, and just a wee bit more sustainable.

 

This is a good place to start, and the subject of the thread. On electricity nationally, if we apply only the proportional amount of electricity to gasoline then we get a very low number 0.16kwh. But we probably would not refine those marginal barrels of oil if we didn't need the gas, so some say it is fair to allocate all of the electricity to the gasoline, and California electricity contribution is higher, so that figure is 0.5kwh/gallon. These seem like a good ball park

0.15-0.5 kwh electricity allocated to refine each gallon of gasoline.

Natural gas is used in many ways in the refining process, but if its not available parts of the oil can be used or electricity. The study you dropped said about 4x as much natural gas is used as electricity. If we build combined cycle power plants (not chp) this will produce 2x as much electricity as the straight electrical imput.

0.3-1.0 kwh electricity could be generated and distributed from the natural gas used for each gallon of gasoline.

Then there is ethanol, which is a public policy contribution. About 15kwh of electricity and natural gas in usable form is used for each gallon of ethanol. There is a 10% blend., and disagreement on real energy, but possible addition of

1.5 kwh of energy in producing and blending corn bassed ethanol per gallon of gasoline. This will reduce the other contributions by 10%. Our total ballpark is then

0.5-3 kWh electricity and other immediately usable energy per gallon of gasoline at the refinery The transport of this gasoline is very small contribution and if you look at my high estimate, it easily includes these costs.

I don't want to go there. We may still need some electricity stations and convenience stores. I don't think this is a large contribution, but the landscape will change with service stations closing.

This is where most of the energy is used, and every year the process becomes more energy intense. To be fair, the us would not import this "saved" energy from opec producers so should it be counted? Getting the oil from the earth to the refinery is the biggest use of non-oil energy in gasoline production. Does anyone have really good figures on ground to refinery, by country?

They were higher than the other links but in the same ballpark. I would think natural gas use would even be higher now. They did help me understand how a high figures come about. Its in the production of wells not the refining of distillates.

 

Right... which is why I don't think it really matters how much of one type of energy is used in just one part of the process of getting gasoline to the cars. Refining the oil is just one part of the huge puzzle, and I guess if we had a thread on EACH part of the puzzle, we could add them all up and get a relevant number. But just discovering this one number doesn't tell us much.

Indeed. This is what I've been harping on. Do we talk in theoreticals? Do we take a stab at a non-existent reality? We simply can't nail these numbers down as you've demonstrated. We can only guess what would happen to the various energies if they were not used to make gasoline. We can game the numbers all day long. In the end, all we know is that it takes a huge amount of energy to get gasoline into your tank... and that number does not take into account the energy in the gasoline itself. Really, that's MY only point here.

 

Drees- Keep in mind Canada has oil sands. US has oil shale, which was a big development in the 1980's but mostly abandoned.

 

Thanks for the correction. But oil/tar sands aren't much better at 3-5:1 EROI.