WSU researcher finds that flaring of natural gas from oil wells appeared to cause an increase of around 11,000 hospital visits for respiratory reasons in North Dakota up to 60 miles away from oil drilling sites.
If only I could run my natural gas furnace using a little bit of the methane found on Titan, a moon of Saturn.
My elderly aunt in Canada recently came into some money. She decided — very generously — to send part of it to each of her nieces and nephews. This gave me the rather wonderful task of deciding how I wanted to spend $1,000 that I had not anticipated receiving. After a bit I decided on […]
I’ve written here before about the problem of unwanted fires burning in coal deposits. Above and below ground, coal fires are a problem in both developed and developing nations. If we are serious about reducing our carbon dioxide emissions, we should address the unwanted fires burning around the world.
When I was young geology student, I learned the basics of petroleum production as they were then understood. Deep layers of sedimentary rocks, including shale, were the “source rocks” for hydrocarbons. The source rocks were too difficult to exploit directly – it just wasn’t economical to mess with them. But through natural processes, the petroleum […]
The name “natural gas” might be a puzzle. After all, how could there be such a thing as unnatural gas? The reason we call natural gas what we do has to do with history. There was a day that people made burnable gas by heating coal. The gases that came off the coal were piped […]
To a geologist like me, it was most notable by its absence in the political campaigns that lurched to their conclusions in November. I’m talking about an energy plan with real teeth, one that addresses everything from national security to the cost of energy to greenhouse warming of the planet.
Energy is the lifeblood of modern economies and there’s no more amazingly useful form of energy than electricity. That’s why I was initially startled to read the recent news that the last of Japan’s 54 nuclear power plants has been shut down, a turn of events that makes Japan the first major economy of this […]