How economical is our energy?

[Richard Hull]

As an engineer, I have a certain amount of bean counter pumped into me as a reality check for project assembly and testing.

How cheap is it? Will it be profitable?

Energy is obviously profitable from a simple economic standpoint; source to user, or there would be no business of energy. profit for each guy handling any product is the order of the day.

How many hands take money on the oil to gas route into in your tank?

There is the owner of the well selling and pumping the crude..... There is the company hauling the crude from the well head to the storage facility at the sea...... The storage facility for holding it in their tanks and ultimately pumping into the ship....... The shipping company for the ocean voyage....... The storage facility that the ship is emptied into..... The hauler to the refinery.... the refinery itself for fractionating the oil into numerous products, only one of which is gasoline to which they ultimately insert additional chemical additives.....The hauler of the gas to the city of distribution.....The mass storage distrubutor within the city.....The hauler to the service stations and the service station owner/pumper. We must not forget the government federal, state and local collectors of taxes at the pump.

Lots and lots of hands out-stretched for your money at each tiny step. How the hell did we ever get the stuff for 30 cents a gallon?!!! How do we currently get it for under $2.00 per gallon when pint bottles of water in the cooler case at the gas station are sold at over $6.00/gallon? Amazing!! You bet.

Now have you ever considered the joule energy output of the delivered energy product versus the joule energy spent in getting it to the user. This is where it gets whacky. I will state that I personally have no idea where this is up front.

Assume your gallon of crude oil is 6000 feet under Saudi soil. Calculate and sum all of the joule energy needed to pump it to the surface....... The joule energy neededed to haul it to the storage place..... the joule energy to pump it into the tank...... the joule energy to load it on the ship........ The joule energy needed to cross half the world...... the joule energy to pump it off the tanker,,,,the joule energy needed to pump it from the storage tank to the trunk and the joule energy for trucking it to the refinery...... The joule energy of the cracking of the oil.

NOW.... we are only left with about 1/5 gallon of actual gas from that gallon of crude taken from Saudi soil, plus the joule energy of transporting storage and dispensing that 1/5 gallon to your tank.

Now take this 1/5 gallon of gas and requarter its actual fuel vlaue of burned joule energy due to Internal combustion energy loses to wheel revolution ratio and tell me what the ratio is of energy spent getting one gallon of crude to the 1/4 gallon you pump versus the energy delivered to your vehicle consuming it.

Basically we are looking at the actual chemical fuel value of 1/20th gallon of gasoline versus all the energy needed to take the full gallon of crude from 6000 feet undergound in Saudi to the US Refinery and the resulting 1/5 gallon of actual gas to your tank.

Forget all costs and all mechanical and thermal joule inefficiencies and loses that are rampant in all the intervening operations involved in this movement and conversion to gas tumbling into your tank.

I would love to work some of the numbers. A lot of gathering of data and numbers would have to preceed all of this.

Richard Hull

[Adam Szendrey]

And what about the energy needed to manufacture the oil wells, the oil tankers, and all the rest of the equipment needed to extract, and transport oil, then to turn it into petrol?
It is obivious that without all that transporting , much more of that gallon would "remain". That is a reason why i prefer local fuel production (electrical, or hydrogen), and why i don't like petrol.
Though if fuel is produced locally, a lot of small facilities (wind turbines, solar cells, etc.) are needed, but no transportation is necessary. Centralized production needs less , but much bigger stations, plus distribution. I guess here is where we have to calculate , which is more economical.
Great topic Richard, thanks . I would also be glad to see some actual numbers.

Adam

[Richard Hull]

For starters, and I will add as I get data so check this over time.....

From NAFA website, 1 gallon of common gas has a chemical fuel vlaue of 1.14 X10e5 BTU
1BTU = 105.5 joules
Thus a gallon of gas contains a joule energy of about 1.2 x10e7 joules.

Thus, the delivered 1/20 gallon of energy to your car for 1 gallon of crude pumped is 6X10e5 joules. This half of the ratio is now fully determined.

*******************************************************

The mass of crude oil is on the order of 6.7lbs/gallon
one foot-lb= 1.356 joules

To raise 1 gallon of crude to the surface would require 6000X 6.7 X 1.356 = 54,511 joules! This is just to get the gallon of crude to the surface in Saudi-Arabia! This is ~1/10 of the entire energy value of the product in your car and the crap is still unrefined and half way around the world!!!!! Note: I'm no dummy, I know that in early well heads an underground pressure in the oil pocket raises a certain amount of the oil to the surface for free, but most oil wells have long lost this and above ground pressurization (more joules) is necessary to continue to remove product. In some fields water displacement can be used, but in remote desertified areas this is not possible unless again the water is forcibly pumped from the sea. (more joules) For those not physics savvy, you can't work a classic pump, per se, against a 6,000 foot head.

I would imagine all future pumpings would not involve a total of more than 1000 feet total against gravity and that would be another 9,000 joules for our gallon making a grand pumping total of about 65,000 joules assuming all pumps are 100% efficient (they aren't). There is also the odd hill here and there that might add to another 1000 feet or so for a new total of, let us say, 75,000 joules spent against gravity in the vertical ordinate pulls of the one pound of crude. From here, it is a matter mostly of moving the gallon of crude more or less horizontally for another 53 million feet.

Here the going is tricky as we have roller bearings on trucks easing this and ocean floating vessels that will reduce the 53 million foot, horizontal ordinate, frictional haul over the simple gravity pull out of the well, up hills and in and out of tanks and ships.

We have now accounted for all of the vertical pull energy for an 8000 foot gravity haul to get the product to your car, but are faced with a tough 53 million foot horizontal haul to your car still uncalculated and have already used over 1/8 of the entire "fuel delivered value" in this one, very short, "Y" ordinate movement.

Starting the fuel moving against its own inertia is a real energy loser once in trucks or on ships. Acceleration is the second biggest horizontal loser. Stops will not return any energy to the system, but instead, will warrant more loses due to being forced to restart the fuel on its way. Beyond this it is constant, unyielding drag forces in water and frictional forces and the energy expenditure needed to overcome those forces to keep the fuel moving that is left to figure. (nearly impossible, even back of envelope to obtain even an order of magnitude figure).


Richard Hull

[3l]

Hi Richard:

One of the incredibly hard parts of that figure search is to find unsubsidized figures anywhere.
If you can get honest numbers that have not be monkeyed with or fudged that would be really neat.
The aproach you are taking might have been done before but it is not public knowlege.
I only looked at the raw material side of oil...feedstocks.

The politics of this quest will get pretty ugly ...pretty fast.
Be careful ...If you love America you will not question but "TRUST US"...the mantra of late.

Happy Fusoring!
Larry Leins
Fusor Tech

[Richard Hull]

Those numbers I have published thus far are due to physics alone and not politics.

I would be stunned if our joule energy expenditure to deliver, from foreign oil fields, gasoline energy in the desired form, at the desired place in this country at the desired time, is better than a 10 to 1 ratio (10 joules spent to deliver 1 joule to the rear axle of a car.)

Engineering wise, this is a gross abomination, but economically it is quite feasible, obviously.

It is done in millions of cars everyday.

No real politics, just getting along in our own way. Truly, business as usual.

The politics is all in playing with the minds and lives of men.

The physics and engineering aspects are cold and fast. That was what I was after.

Richard Hull

[Adam Szendrey]

Hmm, so 10 % of the useful energy contained in petrol is "lost" during extraction. I assume taht when they are pumping in water this is even worse. I wonder how much fuel do oil tankers , and oil freight trains and trucks consume.
Plus the refining process.....tha needs a lot of energy i'm sure.
I still thing that the energy needed to manufacture all the equipment needed, is a factor we should count with.

*
I looked at the specs of an average oil tanker ship, here follows a quote:
"The cruising range is about 20,300 nautical miles at normal continuous rating(NCR). fuel consumption at NCR is about 58.2 mt/day of heavy fuel with a lower heating value of 9 700 kcal/kg The average service speed is about 15.0 knots at designed draft, leaving speed and consumption, with clean bottom in calm and deep sea."

This is a 270 meter long monster. That is about 58 metric tonnes (if i read correctly) of heavy fuel per day.

Adam

[Richard Hull]

The energy to make and install the equipment all along the path of underground crude to gas pump is just so much infrastructure and is amortized economically and energy wise very, very quickly. Once in place, it is free and a relative non-issue to the gallon of crude to 1/5 gallon of gas delivered energy issue that is ongoing every minute of every day at millions of gas stations and in millions of moving vehicles all over the planet.

I'll bet the infrastructure energy costs are amortized to a mere 0.001% of the joule energy ratio issue discussed here.

Richard Hull

[3l]

Hi Richard:

I'm glad to see someone just doing physics for once.
Sorry I had to ask you those questions but
a constant danger is that which passes for science these days.
I daily correct emails of bad science...four years ago it was just a trickle.
The neoscientists start with a physical premise and develop logic around that premise...you know politcal science.
A great palor game but terribly destructive in the physical sciences.
Totally devoid of the scientific method which is just too hard to do according to the new folks.
IE Lysenko style researchers.
You and I are hopelessly out of date so say those in power lately.
As an engineer ,I'm appalled at the massive cost of business.
You would think after a century it would have been improved by now.
Do you think the wooden square wheel will debute this year?
I guess as long as it spits out the golden spew it's economic.
That begs the question of fusion ... how economic must it be?

Happy Fusoring!
Larry Leins
Fusor Tech

[davidtrimmell]

Richard, this is something I have always wanted to see. What is the real cost of Oil? I personally would also like to factor in the environmental, but I know any real science there is hard to filter the politics out of. But your analysis so far is just about what I would have expected. Thanks.

Regards,

David Trimmell

[Alex Aitken]

A few things spring to mind.

When pumping in water to displace oil, this math does not seem to make sense. Pumping water in 'against a 6000 foot head' doesnt make sense either. Water is denser than oil, so you get more energy out than you need to raise the oil - or in other words, the weight of the water should pump itself down the well and the oil up.

Its also implied that the gas fraction is the useful fuel and that all energy used comes from this fraction. Equipment in the oil industry is almost certainly designed to use the crude fractions they cant sell easily, eg diesel engines running on the heavy oil fractions.

Moving bulk materials is quite efficiant in my opinion. One figure that stuck with me is that 100 years ago when coal was moved everywhere by canal the energy required worked out to 1 ton of coal being moved 1 mile burning the equivalent of 1 sheet of victorian writing paper. And thats with a steam engine!

I think one of the key points to understanding the economics of this industry is that everyone in the chain works with almost unimaginable amounts right up until the last two steps - the filling station (which only uses vast amounts) and the customers. Working big leads to massive savings. If it was bottled at source into tiny containers and every stage in the chain had to deal with it like this, and then distribution companies fanned out by country and then by region and then by store areas all having to deal with the bottled form it would end up costing a lot more than bottled water.

[AnGuy]

>As an engineer ,I'm appalled at the massive cost of business.
>You would think after a century it would have been improved by now.
>Do you think the wooden square wheel will debute this year?


You were saving:
http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_04_05_04.html

[Richard Hull]

This is for marvin.

I never talked about pumping water against a 6000 foot head. The oil is that which is needed to defeat the head.

Water will flow into the well via gravity (zero energy cost). It is the energy needed to get the water to the well head in the middle of the desert that is the energy loser. We still have to pump and haul. Water is indeed denser than oil and uses more energy per unit volume to pump and haul from where it is to where the well is.

Secondly, I mentioned that economics was not an issue in my discussion, only the energy spent versus the energy delivered and for the gasoline fraction only.

I think Dave and some others got the gist of my discussion.

In the end, it really doesn't matter either economically or energy wise.

We do what we have to do regardless and squander energy at one point or many points to place it in another form somewhere else. If there is a total net energy loss it is of no real concern to those in the biz. To an engineer it is something to cry over. As long as the bean counters at each stage are happy, then it is also an economically viable venture.

The salient point becomes that any competing process to oil or any other FULLY ESTABLISHED, IN PLACE, INFRASTRUCTURE of the type which I outlined. has got to come to the table with amazing results and super efficiencies all along the way to even begin to unseat that which is so well established and entrenched.

All this while the established process need not look into its own assests and atributes, for it is in place and wroking everyday regardless of oozing pustules of energy loss. It is smooth and ever flowing.....Millions place bread on their tables each day due to it......Millions more depend on its continued functioning enabling them indirectly to place bread on their tables.

Richard Hull

[ChrisSmolinski]

And the interesting thing is that, even though oil may be an "inefficient" form
of energy, it's one of the best things we've got going. Sad but true. At the end
of the day, and at the bottom of the balance sheet, the numbers work out OK.

I'm a big proponent of fission, but I'd be curious to know what the fully
burdened costs are. Some of them are difficult to define, and many are sunk
costs anyway. One thing oil has going for it, and fission could, is economies
of scale. It's difficult to get a new technology going because you have all
those one time costs to amortize. But of course the problems with fission are
not engineering, that part is well known and old hat. The problems are
political. Fission, along with breeder reactors to make full use of uranium and
eventually thorium, would give us a few thousand years of energy. Maybe by
then we'll figure out fusion. Probably not.

Has anyone ever written a science fiction story about the idea of our current
civillization using up all the "easy to get" stuff (energy sources like coal and
oil, and high grade ores). Then there's a major collapse, and another dark
ages, which the world is never able to get out of, because the easy to get
energy and raw material sources are all gone, so they're never able to get
past that level to where they could use say fission again. I'm sure this story
has been done, if anyone knows the title of such a tale, let me know, it would
make for interesting reading.

[DaveC]

This is certainly a good exercise in raising our engineering and other consciousness about energy.

A couple of points not yet made are... to remind everyone of the pictures that made front page, when Saddam Houssein blew up the Kuwaiti Oil flields as he fled in the Gulf War? There were oil geysers... everywhere!! Think aboutthat for a minute. There is literally Zero energy cost for pumping the oil out of many of the the Mid East wells.

I heard the following figure years ago, from a physicist friend who was comparing the potential of Siberian oil versus that of the Middle East. He quoted the figure of $0.25/barrel cost of oil from middle east, versus $3.00/barrel for Siberian oil. This 12:1 ratio, sets out the economic hurdles for the Russian participation in the crude.oil marketplace, and show why Middle East Oil figure so prominently in our national political agendae.

Some other factors to keep in mind, are that once the excavations take place and the piping is in...the energy expended is rapidly overshadowed by the energy transmitted.

A quick example to illustrate: Excavation for a 48" line, would require a trench some 6 x 8 ft in size to give a 4 ft cover..This is about 253, 488 cu ft of soil to remove per mile. AT 150 lb/cu ft and an avg lift of 6 ft ( 4 ft avg depth plus 2 ft to pile it..) =228 million ft -lb of work. Sounds like a lot of energy.

One kilowatt-hr is the energy equivalent of 2.655 M ft-lb of work.

Thus to excavate for a mile of moderate sized oil line, we need to put out 85.86 Kwhr of energy. At electricity prices..here in CA, some $20 worth of energy. In terms of gasoline equivalents, (1gal regular gasoline = 36.1 kwhr) just under 2.4 gallons of gasoline. or about $5.00 .

Now we all know, that you can't actually excavate a mile long trench, 4 ft wide and 8 ft deep on 2.4 gallons of any fuel, but that only measures the inefficiency of out digging machines. Multiply the above theoretical number by any factor you think reasonable. 20, 50, 100.. whtaever.

How many gallons of gasoline could the 48" line pass per hr? Its volume is about 94 gallons per foot. Thus a mile of line would hold just under half a million gallons of gasoline (496.3Kgal./mile). At one mile/hr (1.46 ft/sec) the gasoline value is about $1 M dollars per hr - a one mph flow !!

I don't know know how fast the flow is in these lines, and of course they usually pump crude, not gasoline. But the idea comes across... that there is a substantial return on the energy investment.. and thus these companies make money hand over fist.

Hats off to RIchard for this stimulating thread!!.

Dave Cooper

[Richard Hull]

The purpose of this thread was really to prepare for other questions down the road. There will be lots of them.

How much energy was expended at the Hiroshima/ Nagasaki Sites versus the energy needed to make the U235 and Pu cores alone! Those are, of course, poor examples, for probably 20,000 times the energy delivered was expended in the effort of getting the stuff on target.

We just were not that good at getting the job done on the first pass.

Now however, we can breed PU as an after thought to normal fission which, itself, still demands the hard to separate U235. (We only need enrich it to a few percent in modern power plants)

I know of no power reactors using anything other than U235..........Right?

Still, the U enrichment process remains a very energy hungry business. The old TVA and water falling over a cliff really helped settle the electrical bill in the past.

Still, what is the current state of the art ENERGY efficiency U rock in the ground to watts tumbling out of Surry or North Anna here in VA??

Inquiring minds want to know.

Before someone mentions this, I realize we have mountains of remaining yellow cake piled high from the cold war yet to refine and that active Uranium mining in the US is a distant memory. Still the stuff cost us at the front end. A tremendous amount of energy was spent here in just getting the yellow cake. There was zero concern on the part of the government in obtaining the product for they just saw a "Red under evey bed".

This is now a resource that costs us nothing up to the yellow cake. So, it is from this point in the process to watts out of the nuke plants.

Richard Hull

[dfryer]

As I understand it, the CANDU reactors (Canadian Deuterium-Uranium) don't need the fuel to be enriched at all.. and if the reactor goes haywire you just drain the heavy water moderator and the reaction stops. If someone more familiar with the subject could correct me, I would appreciate it.

[3l]

Hi Daniel:

You can't just drain out the moderator out of a Candu reactor.
You must replace it with plain water to stop the reaction.
The fuel is at several thousand degrees and will burst into flames.
President Carter spent some of his midshipman days helping to extinquish the fire at the NRX Chalk River Facility. A moderator accident flooded the basement of the NRX Facility with heavy water from the reactor caldera. With no moderator to cool them,the blazing hot fuel bundles were exposed to ambient air
burning with vigorously ferocity.
Ala Chernoble

The NRX was the military prototype for the Candu Reactor.
It was so radioactive that each midshipman worked five minutes
then evacated the area.
All the 50 midshipmen from Anapolis Nuclear School got a lifetime dose containing that fire with sand and a bucket.

Happy Fusoring!
Larry Leins
Fusor Tech