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.

lastUpdated: Thu, 17 May 2012 18:14:00 CDT

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.

lastUpdated: Thu, 17 May 2012 13:36:17 CDT

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.

lastUpdated: Thu, 17 May 2012 10:39:00 CDT

Climate change is a significant and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods ranging from decades to millions of years. It may be a change in average weather conditions or the distribution of events around that average. Climate change may be limited to a specific region or may occur across the whole Earth. Climate change is a debated topic that has yet to be proven certainly if humans actually affect climate change.

lastUpdated: Thu, 17 May 2012 06:28:00 CDT

Hydraulic fracturing is the process of pumping water or oil-based fluids with a proppant at sufficient pressure to create a fracture in a hydrocarbon-bearing reservoir. The goal is to create a propped fracture or pathway that will increase the well productivity dealing with rock mechanics, fluid dynamics, chemistry and other complex issues in an effort to design a successful treatment.

lastUpdated: Thu, 17 May 2012 06:05:07 CDT

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.

lastUpdated: Thu, 17 May 2012 02:12:34 CDT

A wind turbine is a device that converts kinetic energy from the wind into mechanical energy. If the mechanical energy is used to produce electricity, the device may be called a wind generator or wind charger. If the mechanical energy is used to drive machinery, such as for grinding grain or pumping water, the device is called a windmill or wind pump. Developed for over a millennium, today's wind turbines are manufactured in a range of vertical and horizontal axis types. The smallest turbines are used for applications such as battery charging or auxiliary power on sailing boats; while large grid-connected arrays of turbines are becoming an increasingly large source of commercial electric power.

lastUpdated: Thu, 17 May 2012 00:28:50 CDT

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.

lastUpdated: Wed, 16 May 2012 23:04:21 CDT

The FBI is investigating what happened with Solyndra, a solar panel company that got a $535 million government-backed loan with the help of the Obama White House over the objections of federal budget analysts. Federal investigators want to know what role political fundraising played in the guarantee of the questionable loan. Washington bureaucrats warned the deal was lousy. And White House spokesmen flail desperately.

lastUpdated: Wed, 16 May 2012 14:19:03 CDT

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...

lastUpdated: Wed, 16 May 2012 12:39:09 CDT

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.

lastUpdated: Wed, 16 May 2012 03:46:25 CDT

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.

lastUpdated: Tue, 15 May 2012 08:35:00 CDT

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.

lastUpdated: Tue, 15 May 2012 07:30:00 CDT

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....

lastUpdated: Tue, 15 May 2012 03:18:00 CDT

The price of petroleum as quoted in news generally refers to the spot price per barrel (159 liters) of either WTI/light crude as traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) for delivery at Cushing, Oklahoma, or of Brent as traded on the Intercontinental Exchange (International Petroleum Exchange) for delivery.

lastUpdated: Tue, 15 May 2012 00:18:26 CDT

Deepwater Horizon was a fifth-generation, RBS-8D design, deepwater, dynamically positioned, column-stabilized,semi-submersible mobile offshore drilling unit.

lastUpdated: Mon, 14 May 2012 17:20:40 CDT

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.

lastUpdated: Mon, 14 May 2012 16:56:00 CDT

Currently, penalties are limited to a maximum of $35,000/day for each violation. Federal law caps liability for damages stemming from oil spills at $75 million. We need to ensure that there are sufficient financial incentives in place to deter oil companies from cutting corners.

lastUpdated: Fri, 11 May 2012 08:29:48 CDT

With just weeks to go before the Obama administration makes a key determination on the environmental impact of a planned massive oil pipeline linking Canada to Texas, protestors are planning a high-profile "sit-in" in front of the White House to block the project. The Keystone Pipeline System is a pipeline system to transport synthetic crude oil and diluted bitumen from the Athabasca Oil Sands in northeastern Alberta, Canada to refineries in Illinois and Oklahoma, and further to the U.S. Gulf Coast. It consists of the operational "Keystone Pipeline" and proposed Keystone XL (Keystone Expansion) pipeline. Keystone XL has faced lawsuits from oil refineries, criticism from environmentalists and some members of the United States Congress. The U.S. Department of State in 2010 extended the deadline for federal agencies to decide...

lastUpdated: Fri, 11 May 2012 08:01:40 CDT

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.

lastUpdated: Thu, 10 May 2012 12:52:29 CDT

Like any new solar technology, amorphous silicon production has higher startup costs than more common technologies that use materials such as silicon. But the costs should come down with mass production, and structurally, amorphous silicon thin films are simpler than other thin film technologies.

lastUpdated: Mon, 07 May 2012 17:51:29 CDT

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.

lastUpdated: Mon, 07 May 2012 07:43:42 CDT

Photovoltaic (PV) materials and devices convert sunlight into electrical energy, and PV cells are commonly known as solar cells. Photovoltaics can literally be translated as light- electricity. The technology employed in photovoltaic (PV) systems is well-developed and there are improvements and modifications occurring regularly, primarily in production processes. The systems are quite reliable and have been well tested in space and terrestrial applications.

lastUpdated: Wed, 02 May 2012 10:43:41 CDT

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.

lastUpdated: Wed, 02 May 2012 01:50:49 CDT

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.

lastUpdated: Tue, 01 May 2012 02:03:26 CDT

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 S?o 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.

lastUpdated: Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:25:00 CDT

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is a New York City-based, non-profit, non-partisan international environmental advocacy group, with offices in Washington DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Beijing. Founded in 1970, NRDC today has 1.3 million members and online activists nationwide and a staff of more than 300 scientists, attorneys and other specialists.

lastUpdated: Tue, 24 Apr 2012 06:49:09 CDT

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.

lastUpdated: Thu, 05 Apr 2012 08:00:00 CDT

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.

lastUpdated: Thu, 01 Mar 2012 17:21:00 CDT

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.

lastUpdated: Tue, 02 Aug 2011 17:36:43 CDT

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.

lastUpdated: Fri, 04 Jun 2010 11:15:17 CDT