This past Saturday, a tanker transporting oil from Iran to South Korea collided with a freighter about 160 miles off the coast of Shanghai. The tanker, filled with 130 tons of highly volatile condensate crude, has been burning for the past three days, raising fears of an environmental catastrophe.
Venezuela and Russia both have economies that are heavily dependent on the price of oil. Both countries are dealing with economic sanctions imposed by the United States. And in the past few days, both countries began moving forward with an official state cryptocurrency. Neither of offering sounds like it should be…
On an overcast day at the end of October, about 25 tanker railcars rolled through the small town of North Creek, New York, north of Saratoga Springs. They were heading for Minerva in Essex county to join a couple of dozen other railcars parked earlier in the month on a 30-mile stretch of track that cuts through the…
Congressional Republicans are one step closer to opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to drilling, a goal that proponents of fossil fuel energy development in Alaska have been chasing for decades.
In what would be a world first, the government of President Emmanuel Macron wants to phase out all oil and gas exploration and production in France and its overseas territories by 2040. Sounds dramatic, but the EU nation has very little to lose as it sets its sights on a greener future.
Hurricane Harvey, the Category 4 storm that barreled into southeastern Texas on Friday evening, has shut down approximately a quarter of US gas production in the Gulf of Mexico.
What was life really like here on planet Earth before animals were big enough to leave fossils behind? How did living things turn from dinky capsules of genetic material into the intelligent, complex organisms that do things like fart and type curse words into posts on the internet? Scientists think they’ve found the…
Scientists trying to unlock the secrets of our universe’s origin need to look no further than the photography studio of Thomas Blanchard and Oilhack. By mixing nothing more than paints, oil, and soap, the artists manage to create colorful miniature universes full of strange, tiny alien worlds.
Donald Trump’s first 100 days are up tomorrow and he needs to accomplish something other than appointing a supreme court justice to a stolen seat. Because he can’t get any legislation passed, he’s going to settle for his old fallback: signing an executive order. This time, the order will pave the way for America to…
We’re only a few days into the Trump era and it’s becoming painfully clear that the new president is mobilizing for a war on science. This situation is eerily reminiscent of attempts to suppress science in Canada during Stephen Harper’s tenure as Prime Minister, from 2006 to 2015. Here’s what Canadians say American…
Exxon Mobile was ordered to turn over 40 years of documents on Wednesday showing the company’s views on and knowledge of climate change. The ruling was made by a Massachusetts judge in an investigation led by the state’s attorney general Maura Healy, who is working to determine how much the company knew about the link…
A new report by the US Environmental Protection Agency concludes that hydraulic fracturing is capable of contaminating drinking water at virtually every stage in the process. The admission won’t sit well with President-elect Donald Trump, who has vowed to expand the controversial practice.
An estimated 20 billion barrels of oil valued at up to $900 billion has been discovered in a West Texan shale formation, the US Geological Survey announced this week. Three times the size of the Bakken oilfields in North Dakota, it could be the largest such deposit ever assessed in the United States.
If you try to imagine the most pathetic gathering of humans ever, it would probably look a lot like this group of people who have amassed their fortunes by stripping the Earth of its fossil fuels and are desperately trying to squeeze the last gasp of relevance out of a backwards-thinking, planet-strangling industry.
The catastrophic methane gas leak outside of Los Angeles has forced local energy companies to revisit their antiquated strategies for storing and transporting natural gas. But there’s a big and potentially more disastrous problem lurking beneath LA’s surface, according to a new video from Vice. The city is literally…
For the first time ever, the United States Geological Survey has published earthquake hazard maps that includes both human-induced as well as naturally occurring earthquakes. USGS maps had previously only featured natural earthquake hazards, but thanks to the alarming rise of man-made quakes, the scientific body has…
Oil is at its lowest price in decades, which has many people worrying about what burning all that cheap oil will do to an already crippled planet. Now President Obama is proposing something pretty ambitious: Taxing oil companies to pay for cleaner transportation infrastructure.
NASA’s Terris MODIS camera reveals how much black smoke is being pumped into the air because of the oil refinery fires in Libya. According to NASA, the fires were “started by attacks on oil terminals in Libya in very early January.” That’s a hell of a lot of smoke.
Saving planet Earth was a prominent feature of President Obama’s State of the Union address tonight, which focused heavily on the need for America to transition off fossil fuels. But amidst all the glossy platitudes about slashing carbon pollution and solving the climate crisis, there was this odd little statement:…
Engineers don’t know exactly what caused the gigantic natural gas leak outside LA that’s the atmospheric equivalent of the BP oil spill. But they suspected it might be aging infrastructure since the pipes are over 50 years old. Turns out that the well hasn’t had a working safety valve since 1979.
