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How many gallons of gasoline would it take to charge an iPhone?

exxonmobilperspectives.com

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Re: How many gallons of gasoline would it take to charge an iPhone?

#21

Post by jessriedel »

revelation wrote: post #7

This is a facepalm on so many levels: - oil company predicts oil will still be used in (a lot of) years - oil company realizes that a) there is an incredible amount of energy in oil and b) the most efficient machines available use only small percentages of that energy Dumping the remaining energy as heat in a climate-change world. Great!

> Dumping the remaining energy as heat in a climate-change world. Great!

Obviously, the contribution to global temperature increases due to the literal heat dissipation of engines is extremely, extremely negligible. Petroleum can cause changes to global temperatures through the release of carbon, which changes the Earth's insulation, but no through actual heat.

Re: How many gallons of gasoline would it take to charge an iPhone?

#22

Post by soren_dahl »

baggachipz wrote: post #17

That's odd, they neglect to mention the true cost of gasoline; both in subsidies used to keep it cheap at the pump, as well as the environmental cost associated with cleaning up their profit-generating mess. ETA: Point out an oil company's dishonesty, get downvoted. Only on HN.

US pump prices are low because you don't tax it like other countries, that's not a subsidy.

Environmental cost? I'll grant you that accidents involving rigs and shipping are spectacular and locally devastating when they happen, but what about the pros of a cheap and relatively easy fuel, it has saved millions of lives.

To give some balance what about farming? Farming has devastated the environment on a global scale. It's subsidised to the teeth too...

"Profit generating mess" is hyperbole, but you can have it since I went for whataboutery.

Re: How many gallons of gasoline would it take to charge an iPhone?

#23

Post by frankus »

Petroleum is really frickin' energy-dense (leaving aside the fact that unless you're heating something only a small fraction can be turned into useful work).

A mid-range home EV charger peaks out at about 20kW.

By contrast, the energy flux of a gas pump is around 20MW.

Re: How many gallons of gasoline would it take to charge an iPhone?

#24

Post by drcube »

Iphones run on oil too (and coal, gas, nuclear energy, and various renewable fuels). It's just that giant synchronous generators are more efficient than a million internal combustion engines, so they burn the oil at a central location and pipe it to you over wires in the form of electricity.

It's like asking "how much gas does it take to run the LCD screen on my car stereo?", comparing it to how much electricity a mansion uses and concluding that gas is the old fuddy duddy stick in the mud holding back progress.

Re: How many gallons of gasoline would it take to charge an iPhone?

#25

Post by tkahn6 »

Adaptive wrote: post #6

We don't mine batteries from the ground. Misleading industry puff piece. The question isn't how much would it take but rather how much does it take. Petrochemical / coal, fossil fuels in general are already generating our power at increasing cost in terms of the raw materials, processing (more difficult processing of oil sands, frakking, etc.) Give me modern nuclear combined with alternatives like increasingly cheap…

> Evidently the free market is awesome except when it results in cheap products that threaten an established industry.

China actively and heavily subsidizes its solar industry. That is hardly the result of a free market.

Re: How many gallons of gasoline would it take to charge an iPhone?

#26

Post by tomkarlo »

jessriedel wrote: post #8
martinkallstrom wrote: post #4

Key takeaway: Vehicles powered by petroleum fuels are incredibly power consuming. Driving a car a single hour on a highway consumes as much energy as an iPhone does in about 46 years. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+hour+*+100km%2Fh+%2F+...

All vehicles are incredibly power consuming (compared to iPods) and there are basic limits to improving this. If you want a vehicle that is large enough to hold a human and can push air out of the way at 60 mph, it's going to take a lot of energy. Driving habits, aerodynamics, and size can change this usage by a factor of order unity, but they can't do it by orders of magnitude. Thus, alternative energy sources must…

Thinking like this is what prevents real innovation. All of these statements seem to be common sense, but they're all individually false when you dig below the surface.

There are huge variations in how much vehicles consume on a per-passenger basis. And there's no reason that alternative energy / electric must approach the energy density of petroleum - that assumption only holds if you're assuming that a vehicle must carry all of its power with it (and many existing ones don't.) Looks at catenary-powered buses commonly in use in many metro areas - low energy consumption per passenger, off-vehicle power source. I'm not saying they're a solution, but just that you can't get to a good new solution by assuming it has to look like the current dominant option.

Re: How many gallons of gasoline would it take to charge an iPhone?

#27

Post by guptaneil »

Aqua_Geek wrote: post #19
jessriedel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All vehicles are incredibly power consuming (compared to iPods) and there are basic limits to improving this. If you want a vehicle that is large enough to hold a human and can push air out of the way at 60 mph, it's going to take a lot of energy. Driving habits, aerodynamics, and size can change this usage by a factor of order unity, but they can't do it by orders of magnitude. Thus, alternative energy sources must…

> If you want a vehicle that is large enough to hold a human and can push air out of the way at 60 mph But do we really need to go 60 mph? Vehicles seem to be optimized for less-common use cases (e.g. 5 people in the car traveling 60 mph) instead of their more common uses (e.g. one person commuting at 30-40 mph). I, for one, would like to see smaller vehicles - NOT SmartCars and the like but an actual rethinking of t…

I suppose this depends on where you live, but going above 60mph is normal usage for me. In fact, a minimum speed limit of 45mph on freeways is fairly common (unless you can't due to traffic, of course).

Re: How many gallons of gasoline would it take to charge an iPhone?

#28

Post by jessriedel »

Aqua_Geek wrote: post #19
jessriedel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All vehicles are incredibly power consuming (compared to iPods) and there are basic limits to improving this. If you want a vehicle that is large enough to hold a human and can push air out of the way at 60 mph, it's going to take a lot of energy. Driving habits, aerodynamics, and size can change this usage by a factor of order unity, but they can't do it by orders of magnitude. Thus, alternative energy sources must…

> If you want a vehicle that is large enough to hold a human and can push air out of the way at 60 mph But do we really need to go 60 mph? Vehicles seem to be optimized for less-common use cases (e.g. 5 people in the car traveling 60 mph) instead of their more common uses (e.g. one person commuting at 30-40 mph). I, for one, would like to see smaller vehicles - NOT SmartCars and the like but an actual rethinking of t…

Fuel economy can only improve by a factor of order unity (typically, less than 2) by changing speeds. And as I said, vehicle size is also incapable of reaching the orders of magnitude needed.

Re: How many gallons of gasoline would it take to charge an iPhone?

#29

Post by mindslight »

Aqua_Geek wrote: post #19
jessriedel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All vehicles are incredibly power consuming (compared to iPods) and there are basic limits to improving this. If you want a vehicle that is large enough to hold a human and can push air out of the way at 60 mph, it's going to take a lot of energy. Driving habits, aerodynamics, and size can change this usage by a factor of order unity, but they can't do it by orders of magnitude. Thus, alternative energy sources must…

> If you want a vehicle that is large enough to hold a human and can push air out of the way at 60 mph But do we really need to go 60 mph? Vehicles seem to be optimized for less-common use cases (e.g. 5 people in the car traveling 60 mph) instead of their more common uses (e.g. one person commuting at 30-40 mph). I, for one, would like to see smaller vehicles - NOT SmartCars and the like but an actual rethinking of t…

They're called bicycles, motorcycles, buses, and trains. The first two give up protection from the elements, the second two give up independence. Keeping both the constraints nets you a single-person car-like device with say a 30hp motor - somewhat more efficient, but not enough to drive adoption. Gasoline (and energy in general) just isn't expensive enough for any of the alternatives to be taken seriously (infrastructure-wise) anywhere but dense urban areas.
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