It is a sign of the success of the oil industry that this analysis always takes the cost of electricity generation back to the source, but assumes that fuel stations pump from a perfect source of naturally refined/distilled hydrocarbons.
It is surprisingly difficult to get numbers on how much oil is used to extract, refine and transport oil.
The headline figure is maybe to compare 11.4 mill. tonnes CO2e emissions from "Scope 1 + Scope 2" (direct emissions from the company plus indirect emissions because they buy electricity and stuff), versus 243 mill. tonnes CO2e from Scope 3 (emissions from people burning the hydrocarbons sold).
If that figure is correct, you can add 1.6 percent to the car tailpipe emissions figures to account for production and refining etc.
But this is an oil & gas company that tries very hard and is among the best in the world for minimising emissions from production and refining. I would not be surprised if gasoline from US shale oil is more than an order of magnitude worse.
>EROI values for our most important fuels, liquid and gaseous petroleum, tend to be relatively high. World oil and gas has a mean EROI of about 20:1 (n of 36 from 4 publications) (Fig. 2) (see Lambert et al., 2012 and Dale, 2010 for references). The EROI for the production of oil and gas globally by publicly traded companies has declined from 30:1 in 1995 to about 18:1 in 2006 (Gagnon et al., 2009). The EROI for discovering oil and gas in the US has decreased from more than 1000:1 in 1919 to 5:1 in the 2010s, and for production from about 25:1 in the 1970s to approximately 10:1 in 2007 (Guilford et al., 2011). Alternatives to traditional fossil fuels such as tar sands and oil shale (Lambert et al., 2012) deliver a lower EROI, having a mean EROI of 4:1 (n of 4 from 4 publications) and 7:1 (n of 15 from 15 publication)
So the major difference between your numbers and the ones I cited, is that EROI is just "energy in versus energy out" and it does not change favorably if you do carbon capture or use renewables or whatnot.
Whereas if you compare CO2 emissions, you can do these things and in theory get down to zero emissions from production and refining of gasoline.
you are right -- EROI and emissions are different. If you add in things like carbon capture, emissions go down but energy-in goes up. Would it make sense to extract and refine gasoline with net-0 emissions if it took more energy than you get out in gasoline? _maybe_, but I don't think its a clear yes!
> It is surprisingly difficult to get numbers on how much oil is used to extract, refine and transport oil.
Damn, I've never thought about that before. In hindsight that feels like an obvious thing to consider but this is the first time I'm aware of that thought entering my brain. Thank you for provoking the thought.
What would be the equivalent consideration on the other side? Would it be something like inquiring into the energy requirements of creating and maintaining the electrical grid, especially given the increased load of wide-scale vehicle electrification, instead of assuming we get that for free?
Yes, people usually call this "Full lifecycle analysis". It takes about as much electricity (or energy) to refine a tank of gas as to charge an EV, so there isn't necessarily an increase in load on the grid by electrifying transport. However some energy generation used by refineries that isn't electricity from the grid would have to get re-arranged.
Anyway maintaining a more robust grid should be much cheaper than maintaining thousands of gas stations and the trucking routes used to keep them filled up.
In 2019, the world seaborne trade volume reached about 11.08 billion tons. Out of this, crude oil, oil products, and gas accounted for approximately 32.5% (3.6 billion tons) of the total volume. Coal made up another 8.4% (935 million tons). In total, energy products represented around 40.9% of the global seaborne trade volume.
It's important to note that these figures are from 2019, and the percentages may have changed since then due to various factors, including evolving global energy markets, fluctuations in demand, and the transition to renewable energy sources. The percentage may also vary depending on how you define "energy products."
This does come up a lot ... for ethanol production. How much fuel is used to produce ethanol is constantly discussed, with some people claiming it is barely break-even or even energy-negative.
But yeah, no one then goes on to give equivalent numbers for petroleum.
Always have to note that ethanol production from corn has dubious energy payoff. Switchgrass is definitely energy positive, but lacks a strong lobbying group to provoke similar investment and development.
It’s not something we often consider because, again, the energy density of carbon fuels _is a couple of order of magnitudes higher_ then batteries. It seems trivial because a fuel hauling truck is an _absolutely immense_ source of energy compared to the energy it consumes to move.
It's a path-dependent calculation, not a state-dependent calculation, so the numbers are all over the map. Take two cases:
(1) Alberta tar sands production, which relies on imports of natural gas to melt and process the tar sand into a crude oil equivalent, called syncrude. If the syncrude is shipped to San Francisco Bay for refining at Chevron's Richmond Refinery, then you have to tag on the shipping fuel used, the gas used in the refinery, and finally the tanker fuel used to move the fuel to a gas station in San Francisco. Finding all these numbers is not easy, it's often proprietary, but you can find that a lot of natural gas is used at refineries (bulk numbers):
(2) Sweet light crude from a pressurized reservoir that's refined a few miles away from the oil field and used in a nearby city.
The end-product, refined gasoline, has the same state property (energy density) regardless of how it was manufactured, but that's irrelevant for getting the energy that it cost to make it. I imagine the spread can be pretty wide indeed, as the above examples show.
My understanding is that a lot of natural gas is used at refineries because, for so long, it was effectively "free" - there was a limited market for it and it was a byproduct of refining the stuff you wanted (light and heavy oils).
The average energy required to extract fossil fuel energy is constantly increasing, as we go after harder and harder to get oil. It used to be easy enough nobody really paid attention to that, but now people talk about "EROI" or energy return on investment, to track the net energy gain of an operation.
Most people still have that simplified view that you just have an oil well and just pump it up. In the US, a significant portion is extracted with fracking, an environmentally pretty terrible method for extraction.
> It is surprisingly difficult to get numbers on how much oil is used to extract, refine and transport oil.
Not to mention the socialized costs of all the wars, military spending and human lives spent to secure stable sources of fossil fuels. If you actually break down the numbers and applied some basic ethics, I doubt fossil fuels have been cost competitive for decades.
It's funny how the USA feels like it has to get militarily involved to guarantee something that the producers are willing and happy to sell. Even moreso when you understand that the USA has plenty of oil itself available.
It's almost as if they want an excuse for running a massive military.
We're already looking at the human cost of some of the components needed for the batteries, like lithium and cobalt. That's what we'll be fighting wars over after we exhaust the supply of oil.
Lithium is considerably more ubiquitous than crude oil, however. And cobalt in batteries is already on the decline, we won't be using it much longer. Heck, most EVs sold today don't use any cobalt at all.
Extracting, transporting, refining oil costs a lot of energy. And that's before we get into the entire military infrastructure that has been built up simply to ensure the safe extraction and transportation of oil around the world.
EV driver here, I live in an apartment complex with no charging stations installed. I and many other neighbors who drive EVs have to go to a charging station to charge.
On the way to the charging station, we probably pass a dozen gas stations.
I love my EV but let's not pretend it's always more convenient. If you have the opportunity to charge at home/work then yes it's great, but you're still reliant on public charging infrastructure if you decide to drive outside your normal range, and it takes a lot longer to charge than it takes to fill up a tank of gas, even considering the speed of Tesla Superchargers.
I mean, it's like, 50 yards out of the way? You stop at whatever gas station you're driving past. I don't know anybody who makes a specific trip to go fuel their car.
The existence and popularity of sites like gasbuddy.com suggests that some number of people are willing to go out of their way to find the lowest price. I personally know people who will make a run to Costco for gas, even if they're not going to go in for groceries, because the price is good. There are at least a half dozen gas stations on the way to Costco.
Half the people driving out of their way to get gas are bad at math. The other half simply don't assign a dollar value to their time.
If your car gets 30 mpg, has a 16 gallon tank (that you refill at 1/4 tank, so you're buying 12 gallons), and you drive an extra 5 miles to pay $3.93/gallon instead of $4.00/gallon, how much did you really save?
I'll give you a hint: It's less than a nickel.
Meanwhile, you've probably driven at least 10 minutes that you didn't need to drive. 10 minutes to save a few pennies.
The math only gets worse as the gas prices go up and your fuel economy goes down. You need a greater delta to make the drive worth it.
This is exactly what gets me every time some German "institute" publishes a study how electric cars pollute more than gas cars. They count everything that goes into producing electricity, but never what goes into extracting, refining and transporting gasoline.
> It is a sign of the success of the oil industry that this analysis always takes the cost of electricity generation back to the source, but assumes that fuel stations pump from a perfect source of naturally refined/distilled hydrocarbons.
It's not like renewable energy doesn't take resources/energy to produce as well. It's just borderline impossible to get real numbers because you'd pretty much need perfect information on the supply chains.
Not saying that renewables don't still win in such a comparison.
It is surprisingly difficult to get numbers on how much oil is used to extract, refine and transport oil.
The best I found was this:
https://www.speakev.com/threads/energy-required-to-refine-oi...
Does anyone have better numbers?