How much energy did it take to make your dinner? Our food takes a lot of fossil fuel to produce. From the field to grocery stores and your kitchen, our food system demands more electricity each year. Inside Energy and Harvest Public Media teamed up to look at where that energy goes and how some are trying to curb the industry’s appetite for electricity.
Inside Energy is looking forward to a new series of stories later this fall investigating the unexpected, unanticipated “sideline booms” that follow in the wake of increased oil and gas production. In our three states – Colorado, Wyoming, and North Dakota – the oil and gas boom is transforming economies from housing to service industries to road construction. The American Petroleum Institute, an industry trade group, commissioned PricewaterhouseCoopers to do some baseline research on the issue. In a transparent effort to prove the economic benefits of oil and gas production, API recently published a vendor survey which listed state by state – and congressional district by congressional district(!) – some 30,000 businesses that provided support services to the oil and gas industry across the country. In Colorado, for instance, the survey said oil and gas provided $25.8 billion to the local economy and supported 213,100 jobs.