Actually EVs use less electricity per mile than gas powered vehicles. Never thought I would need to explain on here, but for a single gallon of gas, it takes approximately 8 kwh from finding oil, drilling, transporting, refining and pumping gas.
Well, all the oil consumed in California isn't drilled and refined in California, so it doesn't make sense attribute all of the estimated kWhs to the Californian grid. This isn't a peg against you, but many people misuse lifecycle/upstream statistics because they don't really understand what these statistics are or how they work. It's fine use them plainly when you are comparing things to get a ballpark idea (in this comparison it's comparing total energy use over the whole market), but the comparison starts to fall apart once you get more granular. The way that oil extraction, refinement, and transportation use energy - electricity in particular - is different than how an EV will use electricity, so the comparison breaks down further. It's just something to think about. EVs do present a unique challenge to the grid, but it's a challenge that will be overcome.
Believe me, it took a lot of research to figure it out and it really is my best guess based on what I can find about efficiency of:
- Equipment to find and drill for oil
- Transport trucks to the refinery
- Electricity used to power the refinery and number of gallons produced
- Transport trucks from the refinery to the gas station
- Amount of electricity used to pump gas into a car
Although, I am finding that my 8 kWh per gallon calculation is likely too low, as it doesn't factor in electricity used for:
- Gas that powers the car to get to the gas station
- Production, Transport and Preparation of food for the truck drivers, gas station workers, refinery works, drilling site workers
- Transportation to and from the jobs of those above
- The above items for the accountants and other supportive staffing
- Keeping the lights on 24/7 at all applicable facilities, even when not actively operating the equipment
- The electricity used to manufacture all applicable equipment
- The electricity used for making the oil and fuel for all applicable equipment
More food for thought on how you got to the 8 kWh number. As you are aware, Crude Oil as a product has alternative uses. This means all of the energy used to refine crude oil can't go into the total energy use for motor gasoline.
I also noticed some oddities with the other points outlined in the second list
>Gas that powers the car to get to the gas station
This would be double counting the gas used. Why a person is driving their car isn't relevant to the calculation being made if the purpose of the calculation is to figure out how much energy it takes to get the oil from the ground to the tank.
>Production, Transport and Preparation of food for the truck drivers, gas station workers, refinery works, drilling site workers
This is unnecessary because the workers would still be eating food if they worked in another industry.
>The above items for the accountants and other supportive staffing
Same here.
>Keeping the lights on 24/7 at all applicable facilities, even when not actively operating the equipment
This one is more ambiguous because I'm not sure what facilities you are referring to. For example, it wouldn't make sense to include any of the energy used by the convenience stores at gas stations because they have the alternative use of being a convenience store. Plus, many of these stores will just switch from having gas pumps to electric chargers, so there's no real difference anyways.
>The electricity used to manufacture all applicable equipment
by equipment do you mean the pumps and tanks at the gas stations? If so you would also have to do the same for EV Chargers to make a fair comparison.
>The electricity used for making the oil and fuel for all applicable equipment
May not be worth looking into because it's likely going to be a rounding error. Let's just say that the pumps have some special kind of oil they put inside the motor. The energy used to make that small amount of oil will then be divided by the total number of gallons pumped by the pump, which easily could be in the 10s of thousands. More work than is necessary.