For fear of oil spills, as of 2008, the U.S. Federal government and various states ban drilling in thousands upon thousands of square miles off the U.S. Coast. These areas, primarily on the Outer Continental Shelf, hold an estimated 115 billion barrels of oil and 633 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This leaves America 's energy needs increasingly at the mercy of foreign autocrats, despots and maniacs. All the while worldwide demand for oil ratchets ever upward.

Biodiesel is the name for a variety of ester-based oxygenated fuels made from hemp oil, other vegetable oils or animal fats. The concept of using vegetable oil as an engine fuel dates back to 1895 when Dr. Rudolf Diesel developed the first diesel engine to run on vegetable oil. Diesel demonstrated his engine at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900 using peanut oil as fuel.

The last giant oil frontier on Earth is in the arctic. The Arctic Ocean Abyssal floor is increasingly believed to hold vast reserves of untapped oil and natural gas, which is expected to become accessible as new deep-sea drilling and hydrocarbons production technology has become available.

The Marcellus Shale, also referred to as the Marcellus Formation, is a Middle Devonian-age black, low density, carbonaceous (organic rich) shale that occurs in the subsurface beneath much of Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York. Small areas of Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia are also underlain by the Marcellus Shale.

There are three major oil sands deposits in Alberta, Canada: The Athabasca Deposit, The Peace River Deposit, and The Cold Lake Deposit. The Athabasca Oil Sands are a large deposit of oil-rich bitumen, or extremely heavy crude oil, located in northern Alberta, Canada. These oil sands consist of a mixture of crude bitumen (a semi-solid form of crude oil), silica sand, clay minerals, and water.

Oil or Tar sands is a colloquialism for what are technically described as bituminous sands, and commonly known as oil sands or (in Venezuela) extra heavy oil. The sands are naturally occurring mixtures of sand or clay, water and an extremely dense and viscous form of petroleum called bitumen. They are found in large amounts in many countries throughout the world, but are found in extremely large quantities in Canada and Venezuela.

The Bakken Shale, is a rock unit from the Late Devonian to Early Mississippian age occupying a substantial part of the subsurface of the Williston Basin, in Montana, North Dakota, and Saskatchewan.

COAL IS POWER, generating more than half of the electricity and about 22 percent of the energy produced in the United States. But it is also very dirty and destructive. Clean coal is the name attributed to coal chemically washed of minerals and impurities, sometimes gasified, burned and the resulting flue gases treated with steam, with the purpose of removing sulfur dioxide, and reburned so as to make the carbon dioxide in the flue gas economically recoverable.

OTEC, or ocean thermal energy conversion, is an energy technology that converts solar radiation to electric power. OTEC systems use the ocean's natural thermal gradient—the fact that the ocean's layers of water have different temperatures—to drive a power-producing cycle. As long as the temperature between the warm surface water and the cold deep water differs by about 20°C (36°F), an OTEC system can produce a significant amount of power. The oceans are thus a vast renewable resource, with the potential to help us produce billions of watts of electric power. This potential is estimated to be about 1013 watts of baseload power generation, according to some experts. The cold, deep seawater used in the OTEC process is also rich in nutrients, and it can be used to culture both marine organisms and plant life near the shore or on land.

Campos Basin is a petroleum rich area located offshore of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It has a total area of 100,000 square kilometers, with 40 fields discovered and operated by Petrobras. Two major oil fields are Marlim and Albacora. Marlim is the largest field, located northeast of the Basin, 110 km offshore in water 650 to 1050 m deep. Marlim produces crude oil over 80,000 cubic meters (500,000 barrels) per day. Total daily production of Campos Basin is 175,000 cubic meters (1.1 million barrels) of oil and 17.36 million cubic meters of natural gas per day. The estimates are that in 2006, Campos Basin will be producing 250,000 cubic meters (1.6 million barrels) of oil per day. The confirmed reserves are 1.1 billion cubic meters (7.21 billion barrels) of oil and condensate, and 101.53 cubic kilometers of natural gas. Exploration seems to be fading; most reserves were found between 1985 and 1997.

The Haynesville Shale is a large "natural gas" deposit in northwest Louisiana. The Haynesville Shale is being described as one of the richest fields of natural gas ever discovered in this region. Most experts and those connected to the industry agree it's too early to say for sure if the discovery will transform the landscape and economy of parishes that sit atop it.

Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum production is reached, after which the rate of production enters its terminal decline. If global consumption is not mitigated before the peak, an energy crisis may develop because the availability of conventional oil will drop and prices will rise, perhaps dramatically.

Outer Continental Shelf (OCS): The Federal Government administers the submerged lands, subsoil, and seabed, lying between the seaward extent of the States' jurisdiction and the seaward extent of Federal jurisdiction.

The Barnett Shale is a natural gas source bed rock that stretches over 16 to 21 North Texas counties and is still actively being discovered. Its 6,000 + square-mile reservoir is already the second largest producing on-shore domestic natural gas field in the United States after the San Juan Basin in New Mexico and Colorado.

The 600-mile-long strip of mountains and forests off Russia's Far East is as good a vantage point as any to see the international oil industry's future and the challenges it faces. Big Oil is having to place ever bigger bets to get the reserves it needs. As a result immense new landmarks -- drilling platforms, pipelines, and liquefied natural gas facilities -- are rising through the mists of this forbidding island. An estimated 45 billion barrels of oil equivalent lie beneath the icy seas off its shores, a figure rivaling what remains in the U.S. or Europe. But developing those resources is proving lengthy, difficult, and expensive. Cost overruns have been huge, and no one knows if the Russians will end up controlling the assets now being built.

The Williston Basin is a large intracratonic sedimentary basin in eastern Montana, western North and South Dakota, and southern Saskatchewan known for its rich deposits of petroleum and potash. The basin is a geologic structural basin but not a topographic depression; it is transected by the Missouri River. The oval-shaped depression extends approximately 475 miles (764 km) north-south and 300 miles (480 km) east-west.

The Bossier shale is on the western flank of the East Texas basin. Bossier wells generally produce dry gas from overpressured sands contained within the Bossier shale. Productive sands are found at depths from 12,000 to 15,000 ft and generally occur in the upper 500 to 600 ft of the Bossier shale.

The 6,000-square-mile Piceance Basin straddles the Colorado River and Interstate 70 in Garfield and Mesa counties, with portions extending northward into Rio Blanco County and south into Gunnison and Delta counties. Its name comes from an Indian dialect, translated as "tall grass." The Piceance could end up being the biggest natural gas field in North America.

The Green River Formation likely represents the largest body of oil shale bearing rocks in the United States and is one of the largest in the world. Oil shale - sedimentary rock that contains a petroleum-like substance called kerogen - is found in great quantities in the western United States, particularly in the Green River Basin spanning portions of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.

The Santos Basin is an 352,260 square kilometres (136,010 sq mi) offshore pre-salt basin. It is located in the south Atlantic ocean, some 300 kilometres (190 mi) south east of São Paulo, Brazil. One of the largest Brazilian sedimentary basins, it is the site of several recent (2007-08) significant oil fields, including Tupi and Jupiter.