Energy in an EV vs. ICEV. It’s hard to imagine that there’s anything like the energy input for ICEVs in EVs. When one thinks of the hundreds of parts, many of which have to be cast and then machined, there’s got to be a lot of energy involved.

Some EV batteries have to be “baked” for a while, I believe. But with pass through ovens and decent insulation that shouldn’t be a major energy suck.

I would imagine the materials in EV motors would be highly recyclable which would save a lot of energy. (Metal casing and copper windings.)

Tankers are huge consumers of so-called bunker fuel.

Extraction consumes a huge amount of electricity – in California, extraction is the second largest use of electricity, if I am not mistaken. Heavy sour crudes that require heating to even be able to be extracted use an immense amount of natural gas (with it’s own fracking overhead!) and water, which also uses a non-trivial amount of electricity to pump out of the ground. In a few cases, they even use solar heat systems to heat the water used to soften up the oil – so it can be pumped up out of the ground.

As has been mentioned, tar sands bitumen is even worse – after “washing” out the sand, the gunk is way too thick to pump, so it has to be diluted with a solvent – which itself has to be produced, with another set of overhead energy inputs. Even after it is diluted, moving the tar sands bitumen through thousands of miles of pipeline (that has to be constructed, which takes a lot of energy!) is a nontrivial thing.

All this *before* we even talk about refining the fossil fuel into a quality fuel. To refine heavy sour crudes takes a lot more effort and special refining facilities. To handle the tar sands bitumen which is quite acidic, the refinery has had to add something like a $10B addition – and all that stuff has a large energy overhead.

Manufacturing MTBE is probably not easy – and it probably uses a fair bit of energy – and all that energy has it’s own overhead carbon footprint.

After it is refined, the fuel still has to be stored and moved around, and the last leg to the gas station is by truck – all the diesel and natural gas and electricity and water used along the long path from finding the oil to pumping it into your tank – is staggeringly energy intensive.

Also, as mentioned already, the materials and “consumable” items used in regular maintenance of ICE cars must be included in the true total of carbon produced by burning gasoline in cars.

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On another point in the article – do we actually know that it takes more energy to build an EV vs an ICE car? Aluminum in the engine block and the rest of the ICE drivetrain come with an immense electricity overhead. Smelting bauxite into aluminum is anything but easy.

What part(s) of the EV is so energy intensive that it overshadows what goes into an ICE?

Neil

Not energy used to create a gallon of gas, but grid power (electricity).

Not the entire process of getting from under the ground and into gas tanks, but refining.

Words have meaning.

“… if you take the same grid power the oil refinery used to refine oil into a gallon of gas and put that same power directly into the battery of an electric car, thanks to the great efficiency of an electric motor it will actually go the same if not a tad further than a normal gas car would go on that gallon of gas”

If you would like to talk energy, Lets keep it simple, per barrel of oil sands crude, you need 1100 cu ft of natural gas to steam it out of the ground, mix with 12 gallons of diluent to create a barrel of Dilbit from the bitumen, then another 900 cu ft of natural gas to turn it into synthetic crude… then you can stick it in your refinery. The refinery processing cost is minor so don’t fixate on it.

instead try burning that natural gas in your local utility compansy electrical generator, Got it?

And just so other readers are clear, It takes 13kwh to charge the battery of the Chevy volt on a bad day, not 3. That 13kwh will take you about 35 miles.

That is not the issue.

The issue is that some people seem to think that more GHGs will be emitted from a tropical dam than a coal plant over a half a century or more.

If you build a tiny dam in Norway in order to direct water to a high head generator (with a drop of several hundred metres), the amount of concrete and other hardware required is very low for the lifetime amount of power which can be harnessed from this dam, and very little vegetation if any will decompose in the dam.

By contrast, if you build a much larger low head dam in the Amazon rainforest in order to generate the same amount of power, you will use far more concrete and other materials, and probably have to cut through the forest for access roads opening up the forest to exploitation. Such a dam will have far higher embodied emissions from the structure and processes associated with its construction, and as you will also flood a huge area of forest, there is a strong likelihood that large quantities of CO2 and methane will be released over many years from decomposing vegetation in the dam with some degree of decomposition continuing on an indefinite basis as more vegetation enters the dam carried by the river. True, the amounts will be highest in the first few years, however the problem never completely disappears and even if you do share the first few years of emissions over the life of the dam, such a dam will still have higher impacts than a small high head dam in a cold country. .

That said, I posted the calculations that I made for refining. Refining. Refining. Nothing but refining.

Got it? 3.14 kWh of energy is used to refine a gallon of gas.

Very little of that 3.14 kWh of energy is electricity from the grid.

Most of the energy is fossil fuel (oil, coal and natural gas).

Were we to take the non-grid electricity energy and turn it into electricity it would not make a bunch of electricity.

We would end up with far less than 3.14 kWh of electricity because thermal generation of electricity is inefficient.

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Now, you’re bringing in extracting and shipping. That is a different issue. Understand?

Most of the energy used to extract and transport oil/gasoline is in the form of fossil fuel. Understand?

If we used the energy used to extract and transport oil/gasoline we would lose a lot of that energy in conversion from fossil fuel to electricity. Understand?

One cannot take the Energy used in creating (extracting, transporting and refining) a gallon of gas, convert it into a kWh measurement, and then claim we could run X miles in an EV based on those kWh. It is not in a form we can stick into batteries.

Energy and electricity are not the same thing.

Here is a good source:

http://www.hybridcars.com/the-oil-sands-surprising-new-nemesis-plug-in-vehicles/

I also notice that carbon footprint for gasoline cars is hopelessly optimistic year 2000 stuff. This is before refinery’s started using heavy oil in a big way, which is now used for 20%+ of us gasoline production ( heavy oil from Canadian oil sands and elsewhere).

For many, owning an all-electric vehicle means plugging it in at home at night, no more. This cost & environmental impact can vary depending upon their power source, (which could be solar or wind, and WILL be in the future). They all want to go “behind” electrics, but, if they went behind gas combustion, they would lose by a long shot. If you want to go behind an EV, FIRST go behind a gas combustion car and tell me EVs are not the most green vehicle there is. Period.

Learn what it means.

In regards to where you get your energy on the grid quite understand where you get it from coal fired power stations, gas fired power station, nuclear, not from renewable, as black gold Americans economy’s best friend, keep the lights on a night and keeps to tyres on that keeps them moving rolling the economy along without it, you’ll be on barefooted and naked.