How much would it take to replace all of Iran's oil with electricity?

With the recent announcement out of Iran that they just discovered 50 billion barrels of oil in a single reserve, conversations about what this means for the oil markets has no doubt traveled across the energy universe.

This is a substantial amount; it has been ages since such a big find. The most recent large find before this one was the Midland, Texas discovery in 2016 of 20 billion barrels of oil.  This single field in Khuzestan, in southern Iran, is about 1/3 the size of all of the Alberta Oil Sands. Huge.

To put it into some perspective, a friend of mine recently asked what it would take to replace Iran’s oil production with electricity.

To get right to the point, for your reading pleasure, here is the math:

Iran’s annual production is about 1.5 million barrels per day. About 1.5% of the world total production.

That is 547,500,000 barrels of oil per year. Converted to gasoline, that would make 61.2 billion liters of gasoline and diesel fuel. Put into cars and diesel vehicles with a blended efficiency of 9.5 liters per hundred kilometres, that would move vehicles about 640 billion kilometres every year.

If that distance was traveled in electric cars instead, it would take about 93 billion kWh. So, if a 3 MW wind turbine can produce 11 million kWh per year, you would need about 8,457 - 3 MW turbines to replace all of the oil from Iran. Quite a few.

To picture this, you need about 5 acres per turbine. So, to complete this substitution, you would need 42,284 acres; about 170 sq. km. This is about the size of 21% of a city the size of Calgary. Realistically, 8,457 turbines would need to be scattered further in practice. But imagine the size of Calgary and you could probably fit these turbines within its city limits.

If it was powered by solar, that would need more land, about 5 times as much. Solar needs about 260,000 acres to produce the same amount of energy. This would be about 128% of the area of Calgary. Larger but not dramatically so.

So, there’s your answer, a million-person, city-sized plot of land can displace the oil from Iran. 

On one hand, it sounds outrageously ambitious; on the other hand, some of you will say, is that all?