Yes, the numbers change for shorter distances. There’s some loss in loading up a fuel tank and driving it to the station. But again, the high energy storage capacity of chemical energy still makes a huge difference.

If a loaded semi gets 8 miles per gallon of diesel, then moving a tanker full of 10,000 gallons of gasoline 200 mile (320 km) s will burn 25 gallons of diesel in order to transport 10,000 gallons of gasoline. Even with less efficient trucks (let’s say 6 mpg for 33.3 gallons of diesel burned), it’s still pretty efficient in terms of “losses,” of about one third of one percent of the original volume of fuel consumed. Of course, diesel is more energy dense than gasoline, especially gasoline mixed with ethanol, so the efficiency might drop to 99.5% instead of 99.7%, but we’re still talking about a pretty fundamentally efficient operation.

The real efficiency gains of electricity over fossil fuel (or any chemical fuel) comes from the more efficient motors. An electric car that goes 3 miles (5 km) per kwh is the equivalent of going 100 miles per gallon (42 km/L) of gasoline. A heat pump that has 300% efficiency only needs to transmit 1/3 as much electrical energy as would have been necessary for bringing fuel to a combustion-based heater.

So if you start breaking it down by actual use case, you might be able to make some gains back to mitigate the higher cost of transporting electricity across large distances. But it still remains that all the other methods are very efficient, too.