Energy, features and articles | Educational Science

Jul 30, 2014

Ohio Fire Disaster Spotlights Need for Fracking Info (Op-Ed)

Seth Shulman is a senior staff writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a veteran science journalist and author of six books. This op-ed, and Shulman's other Got Science? Columns, can be found on the UCS website. Shulman contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights....

Aug 9, 2014

Explainer: Back Burning and Fuel Reduction

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. The recent surge of bushfire disasters has introduced fire-fighting tactics to everyday language. Two important approaches that use fire to fight fire are “back burning” and “fuel-reduction burning”. Unfortunately...

Sep 15, 2014

Flawed Fracking Wells Taint Pennsylvania's Drinking Water

Fetid, flammable, polluted drinking water in Pennsylvania homes near natural gas drilling sites was contaminated by methane escaping from flawed fracking wells, a new study shows. Based on geochemical forensics work, the research makes a direct link between tainted drinking water and leaky gas wells in the Marcellus Shale. The...

Sep 26, 2014

3D-Printed Rocks Could Change Fracking Practices

3D printers have been used to make everything from human stem cells to food to full-size cars, and now researchers are using the technology to build models of rocks to study how fluid seeps underground. Geologists are reproducing the microscopic, intricate pore networks of rocks in scaled up 3D-printed models....

Oct 9, 2014

Gassy Blob: Biggest US Methane Source Spotted from Space

A remote, coal-rich patch of the Southwest produces the highest methane concentrations in the United States, a new study reports. The methane hotspot is centered over New Mexico's San Juan Basin, where some 40,000 wells suck out natural gas trapped in coal seams. (Natural gas is almost entirely methane.) The...

Dec 13, 2014

Trillions and Quadrillions: Numbers Tell U.S. Energy Story

With more stars in the sky than can easily be counted, Carl Sagan, in his book “Billions and Billions,” wrote about how hard it is to talk about the cosmos without using huge numbers. The same is true for energy consumption and production in the U.S. Daily crude oil production...

Feb 2, 2015

'Missing Oil' from 2010 BP Spill Found on Gulf Seafloor

This story was updated Feb. 6 at 9:45 a.m. EST. Up to 10 million gallons (38 million liters) of crude oil from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill has settled at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, where it is threatening wildlife and marine ecosystems, according to a new...

Feb 11, 2015

Peak Oil: Theory or Myth?

Peak oil — the point in time when domestic or global oil production peaks and begins to forever decline — has been looming on the horizon for decades. Countless research reports, government studies and oil industry analyses have tried to pin down the exact year when peak oil will occur,...

Jun 5, 2015

Ox Urine to Olive Oil: Fighting Garden Pests Like the Colonists

Wesley Greene is garden historian for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. This article is adapted from one that originally appeared as Snails, Flies and Caterpillars in The Interpreter. Greene contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. When humans first gathered food plants into a garden, they simultaneously...

Aug 21, 2015

The Alaskan Arctic Oil Drilling Controversy Explained (Infographic)

The Federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) calculates a 75 percent chance of one or more spills of more than 1,000 barrels of oil over the next several decades if Arctic drilling proceeds as planned. In 2014, the United States consumed 6.95 billion barrels of petroleum products, an average...

Nov 5, 2015

The Dirty 'Clean Fuel': Why Natural Gas Out-Pollutes Coal (Op-Ed)

Jeremy Deaton writes about the science, policy and politics of climate and energy for Nexus Media. You can follow him at @deaton_jeremy. He contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Climate activist and author Bill McKibben has likened 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming...

Nov 6, 2015

Obama Administration Rejects Keystone XL Pipeline

President Obama announced Friday morning that he has denied TransCanada’s permit application to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline in the U.S. “The State Department has decided that the Keystone XL pipeline would not serve the national interest of the United States,” Obama said. “I agree with that decision.” Obama...

Jan 30, 2017

The West's Largest Coal Plant May Close

The largest coal-fired power plant in the West — one of the biggest climate polluters in the nation — could close later this year, a major symbolic blow to the future of coal as the backbone of America's electric power grid. The owners of Arizona's Navajo Generating Station northeast of...

Mar 4, 2017

Does gasoline go bad?

Has it been a while since you moved your car? Do you have leftover fuel in your garage for the lawn mower? If so, you may wonder, does gasoline go bad? Unfortunately, there's no hard and fast rule, said James Speight, an energy consultant and author of the Handbook of...

Jun 12, 2017

High-Profile 'Clean Coal' Project Staggers, as Trump Seeks to Slash R&D Funds

The first attempt at building a clean coal power plant that captures its carbon dioxide before being burned is struggling to get up and running in Mississippi, as the Trump administration plans to sharply cut back funding for the technology. Mississippi Power's Kemper power plant is designed to allow the...