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Quiz: Where Does Mining Matter Most?
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Which state’s economy is most dependent on mining? Trivia for energy nerds!
Inside Energy (https://insideenergy.org/tag/data-visualization/page/2/)
Which state’s economy is most dependent on mining? Trivia for energy nerds!
About forty-five percent of U.S. crude oil pipeline is more than fifty years old. Even pipeline laid into the ground in the 1920s and before (think the There Will Be Blood era) is still operating today.
Inside Energy reporter Emily Guerin just moved to North Dakota to cover the energy industry and its impacts on that state. Her “Inside The Boom” blog will be an occasional web feature at insideenergy.org.
In the wake of a series of deadly spills, the safety of crude oil traveling on railroads has become a national question. A new federal rule requiring railroad companies to notify state officials where Bakken oil is moving went into effect last week (although railroad companies are doing all they can to keep routes secret). Yet the most basic questions about crude-by-rail – how much oil is moving on railroads and where exactly is it going – have proven difficult to answer. How much crude oil is moving on U.S. railroads? It depends on who you ask and how you ask.
As states ready for the Obama Administration to release new carbon emissions regulations next week, a major question looms: What’s the most sensible way to measure and compare greenhouse gas production? Two states dwarf all others when it comes to sheer amount of carbon dioxide released: Texas and California. Texas is such a carbon giant that it accounts for 12% of U.S. emissions and produces nearly twice as much as the next closest state, California. This graph shows 2011 carbon dioxide emissions based on Energy Information Administration (EIA) data:
But there’s more than one way to slice and dice emissions data. Looking at carbon dioxide produced per dollar earned by industry, the story changes: Wyoming tops all states in carbon emitted per dollar earned, followed by West Virginia and North Dakota.
It was a bad winter, full of polar vortices and an endless march of blizzards. And according to data from the Energy Information Administration, Americans spent more on heat this winter than last winter: $14.0 billion more, a 4.4% jump. Here’s what this data tells us:
As consumers, we spent more on energy as a whole this winter than last. We spent a little less (3%) on transportation. We spent 10% more on electricity.
An average American household uses 903 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity per month, enough energy to put your Volkswagen bug into space (if you were incredibly motivated). Where does that electricity come from? In the U.S., 37% of our electricity is generated from coal and 30% from natural gas. The rest comes from nuclear and renewables (hydro, wind, solar). These energy sources vary widely from region to region.
An average American household uses 903 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity each month. That’s enough to power your household appliances and electronics, but what else can you do with 903 kWh? Here are some unusual ideas:
You could use it to run your standard conventional oven on cleaning mode for the entire month. Or, converting kWh into food calories, it would be the equivalent of eating a stick of butter every 41 minutes. For the whole month.
When you look at your monthly electricity bill, you probably focus on the number with a dollar sign in front of it. But there’s another value listed: how much energy you actually used. If you are a perfectly average American living in a perfectly average household, your monthly electricity bill will read 911 kilowatt hours (kWh), which costs $114. But most of us don’t live in perfectly average households. (The state that comes closest to matching the average monthly electricity usage is Ohio).