Inside Energy (https://insideenergy.org/series/data/page/3/)
What is the most energy efficient way to boil water? And which method has the smallest carbon footprint? The familiar act of boiling water lets us examine how the choices we make daily roll up to global energy consumption.
Colorado’s connection between people and drilling goes back much further than the recent frenzy of oil and gas development: Coloradans aren’t just living among new wells, they are also living among – and sometimes on top of – wells drilled and abandoned decades ago.
Explore Wyoming’s abandoned well locations on this interactive map.
Inside Energy’s Jordan Wirfs-Brock explains how and why the massive methane leak from an underground natural gas storage facility in California matters to Colorado and to the oil and gas industry here.
Methane is spewing from an underground natural gas storage field in southern California called Aliso Canyon at a rate of 50,000 kg per hour – the equivalent of 5 million full-grown cows. The leak is causing health problems, air traffic detours, and mass evacuations. And because methane is a potent greenhouse gas, its contribution to global warming is like having three extra coal-fired power plants. This isn’t just California’s problem: In addition to those direct consequences, Aliso Canyon is a wake-up call about the challenges facing our natural gas infrastructure. U.S. energy strategy, as outlined by the new Clean Power Plan, hinges on the idea that burning natural gas has a smaller carbon footprint than burning coal.
As part of our Feasting On Fuel project, Jordan Wirfs-Brock has created this simple quiz to test your knowledge, or best guesses, on how much energy it takes to create basic food products.
As part of our IE Questions project, Inside Energy investigated how much energy is lost as electricity travels from a power plant to the plug in your home. In the U.S., five to six percent of the energy in electricity is lost during transmission and distribution, but that varies widely state-to-state and year-to-year. See how your home state measures up.
How much energy is lost along the way as electricity travels from a power plant to the plug in your home? This question comes from Jim Barlow, a Wyoming architect, through our IE Questions project. To find the answer, we need to break it out step by step: first turning raw materials into electricity, next moving that electricity to your neighborhood, and finally sending that electricity through the walls of your home to your outlet.
Companies have drilled tens of thousands of new wells in the last few years; deeper wells, that will be more expensive to clean up when they run dry. How much more expensive?
Cybersecurity experts like to divide the world into two categories: Those who have been hacked, and those who have been hacked but just don’t know it yet. As the electric grid gets digitized, it becomes increasingly vulnerable to hackers. We know hackers are getting onto the grid. So how big of a threat do they really pose?
