Hi Neil,

I have an even better question for you: surely you can give an estimate of the energy required for producing oil and gas? I'm sure you know the answer, tracking back the vast amount of reactions on various themes from you on this blog.

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If the answer would be just a few percent, does this than undermine the credibility of Peak Oil?
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By the way, your example in the lower part of your question/remark from July 10/11:44am reminds me of the airborne laser example I gave earlier: you just calculate with gasoline and electricity. You conveniently forget the embedded energy contained in the hardware. Also there might be constraints with cost and availability of primary goods required to realize the hardware, especially in case of mass production.

Andre,
I don't know for natural gas, but refining oil takes about 10% of its energy content so for the US that would be about 4% of total US energy use. If you add in refining losses and the cost of distribution, building refineries and service stations its probably another 15% for a total of 10% of the entire US energy budget, and would guess that its about the same for the rest of the world. I would say that's a significant energy use, considering its only delivering 30% of total energy. Hydro and wind energy probably have the lowest embedded energy costs of renewable energy(1-5%).

Now you are presenting an article about mineral availability so you should present some numbers about energy use, especially those critical metals such as copper, neodymium, tin, uranium, nickel,......

The comparison of an electric vehicle(RAV4EV) and an ICE(RAV4) is comparing almost identical vehicles so the infrastructure for manufacturing is almost identical. There may be constrains in availability of Lithium, Nickel, Copper, not present in an ICE vehicle .. but unless we have a number for energy used to produce these metals its hard to know what the constrains will be.