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?
https://sustainability.equinor.com/climate-tables
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.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
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.
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?
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.
ChatGPT summary:
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."
Sources: https://unctad.org/webflyer/review-maritime-transport-2020
But yeah, no one then goes on to give equivalent numbers for petroleum.
(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):
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pnp_capfuel_dcu_nus_a.htm
(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.
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.
<snark, i'm totally against military aggression>
It's almost as if they want an excuse for running a massive military.
There must be small impact of that as well to the CO2 calculations.
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.
Siting a gasoline station is highly strategic. They know exactly where to put them and how much to charge on the real estate and vendor sides.
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.
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.