What do you use to heat? Maybe with electricity? No, of course not, you will say. Who else heats with electricity? It doesn't matter whether it's oil, gas or wood pellets – your heating system still needs electricity. For example, for the control electronics in the heating system or in the room control, in the electronic radiator valves, for the indoor and/or outdoor thermostat, the circulation pumps ...
And this goes even further, because it takes much more electricity to bring your energy source (oil, gas or wood) to your home! This is often referred to as "grey energy". It is already in the product before you even use it.
Why look at grey electricity? Well, because we will save a lot of it if we drive electric cars. You often hear: There is not enough electricity for electric cars. At a cursory glance, logical: electric cars consume an average of between 15 and 20 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity per 100 kilometers (km). Extrapolated to about 12,500 km per year and multiplied by about 41 million vehicles, this results in the sum of almost 100 billion kilowatt hours of electricity that are needed. * Won't all the lights go out soon when millions of electric cars are charged at 6 p.m. in the evening? (Why do the lights always go out and not the charging station?)
Power-guzzling additives
We probably misjudge the additional demand, because even a car with a combustion engine needs - in addition to huge amounts of gasoline or diesel - lubricating oil, AdBlue, filters, brake pads and now and then a new exhaust if the old one is rusted through. Significantly more than an electrically powered vehicle.
Example additives: AdBlue is required for the exhaust gas aftertreatment of diesel engines. However, the urea in it is not extracted in the millions of toilets in the republic, but through a sophisticated production process based on natural gas. One ton requires about 85 to 160 kWh of electricity. After mixing with pure water, the resulting product must then be filled (in plastic canisters, which also have to be produced), transported (to the gas station) and sold (by the way, also in online retail, which causes further truck journeys). AdBlue filling stations for trucks, for example along motorways, are supplied by van trucks, which ensures additional fuel consumption.
The decarbonization of the heating sector is getting underway: Many old oil and gas heating systems are currently being shut down. One technology in particular is benefiting from the heating transition. But there are also alternatives.Energy transitionLubricating oils, on the other hand, are still mainly produced on the basis of coal, but other raw materials and crude oil are also used. This is also time-consuming, requires energy and, as a result of the chemical reactions during production, also releases a lot of energy, which is mainly "cooled away". The resulting products have to be filled, stored, transported and sold. Not every step takes place in the German power grid, but everything is energy that we can save.
The long road from oil to gasoline
Gasoline and diesel do not fall from the sky either, nor do they grow at the gas station. Both are also highly industrial products that have to be produced/produced, processed, stored, transported and sold.
Let's start our observation backwards, at the gas station, because this is where the formation of "gray energy" begins. Every gas station is illuminated, the pumps need electricity to operate, the pumps too (gasoline and diesel do not flow into the tank alone), the gas station shop is illuminated and air-conditioned, a lot of electricity is consumed in the shop itself (from coffee to ice cream chests) and the cash register to the EC terminal also needs electricity. All electricity that is only needed for refueling, not for driving. Around 200,000 kWh per year per filling station. Here alone, just under 0.1 kWh of grey electricity per litre is already added to the energy balance.
But what happened before?
The finished fuels have to be transported, from the refinery to the filling station. This requires pipelines, tankers and tanker trucks, of which hundreds, if not thousands, are constantly on the road throughout Germany and Europe every day to distribute the liquid fuels in the country, from the motorway to the last village petrol station. This also requires energy and electricity: for the operation of the truck (from its manufacture, through fuel consumption to recycling at the end of its life), for the railcar of the trains (partly electrically operated) to the pumps. Everything requires energy and electricity. By the way: When switching to electric vehicles, the tankers can be excluded anyway.
Energy-intensive cracking
Now to the production of the fuels. From school chemistry class, you remember the term cracking. Correct. This is because various cracking processes turn crude oil into gasoline and/or diesel. One thing in particular is needed for this: energy, especially heat and electricity. Among other things, crude oil has to be heated to over 400 degrees to trigger the chemical processes that result in gasoline and diesel (and many other substances). Without the use of this auxiliary energy, there is no fuel. And also electricity, because all the liquids want to be pumped from here to there. Filters and valves have to be supplied, the system has to be controlled and illuminated, and so on.
refinery Part of the facilities of the "Total" oil refinery in Leuna/Saxony-Anhalt. Total is cautious with accurate consumption data.
© Total
According to a 2009 inquiry by the U.S. Department of Energy, a refinery requires around 1.585 kilowatt-hours to produce one liter of fuel (though not just electricity). This information is very precisely confirmed by the GEMIS database. For the average consumption of seven liters per 100 km, more than 11 kilowatt hours would come together at this point alone. This would be enough to drive 50-80 kilometers with an electric vehicle. Sounds crazy, but it's true. The electricity consumption alone for the production of the fuels therefore corresponds to a significant proportion of the electricity consumption of an electric car. In other words, half of the electricity needed by an electric car goes into the fuel of the combustion engine.
But the refinery has to get to the raw material oil somehow, i.e. the crude oil has to be transported to the refinery and in Europe this is usually done via pipeline. The Total refinery in Leuna, for example, is currently still supplied with crude oil from Russia. One example: The southern European pipeline, which runs from the port facility in Marseille to the Rhine-Neckar area and supplies various refineries with crude oil (769 km). To transport the crude oil over this route, powerful pumps with power consumption between 1600 and 2200 kW are needed, a total of 34 units. The annual electricity consumption is to be 100 gigawatt hours (gWh).
Example calculation: The average electricity consumption of an electric car, including charging losses, is 17.5 kWh per 100 km; at 12,500 km per year, i.e. just under 2200 kWh. 100 GWh corresponds to 100,000,000 kilowatt hours. This electricity consumption is equivalent to the consumption of more than 45,000 electric vehicles. And that's just a pipeline. Many more run through Europe, Asia, the whole world. The electricity consumption is enormous.
Lack of data complicates complete picture
The fact that the oil has already come a long way to the refinery no longer has much to do with our power grid, but it still gnaws at the energy balance of the fuels. It remains true that the amount of energy bound in oil is proportionately significantly greater than the energy required to transport it, but the energy requirement of electric vehicles is also significantly lower than that of combustion engines.
The whole consideration "from the borehole to the wheel" is therefore also called "well to wheel" – but it remains incomplete because hardly any exact data is available or no data is given. The Total refinery in Leuna refuses to make any statement about the energy consumption of fuel production.
However, if the available figures for electricity consumption in the refineries alone are only halfway correct, the additional electricity demand for e-cars will fall significantly. This means that even if an e-car consumes 15 kilowatt hours, this does not have to be generated additionally. In addition, we may need ten, maybe even only five kWh. That's still an additional demand, no question about it – but it's billions of kilowatt hours less than if the vehicle numbers were converted one-to-one.
If the efficiency in the (motor, battery, charging technology) and (LED, high-efficiency pumps) e-cars also increases and the transport losses due to local power generation decrease – then the argument that there is not enough electricity for electric vehicles completely collapses.
* In a previous version of the text, unfortunately, a typo had crept into the calculation, resulting in the wrong figure of one trillion.
This much-discussed article from 2022 has been published in full length on the blog of the Berlin-Brandenburg Electromobility Interest Group.
source : Whether it's a petrol or coal car – the problem is the weight – infosperber