The largest refining hub in the U.S. is located in the Texas-Louisiana coast, but there are smaller hubs all over the country.

No matter where you are, it’s important to know your local power provider(s) and the state regulator that oversees power price changes.

This is the agency that supervises pipeline safety in the United States. Their website hosts a trove of resources including the National Pipeline Mapping System that you can use to find pipelines in your local area.

This Department of Energy agency is a trove of statistics about energy use, including state-level figures and history of electricity and fuel prices. It also contains a good explanation of how gasoline prices work.

A barrel is equivalent to about 42 gallons. A company or a field’s production, or a refinery’s processing capacity, is usually measured in barrels per day.

The way of life in communities all over the U.S. is being transformed by new techniques in oil drilling. For example, large swaths of the U.S. Northeast – New York, Ohio, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania – sit below a rich natural gas field called the Marcellus Shale, and there’s drilling going on under local churches, schools, airports, and cemeteries.

Some of these national governments are heavily reliant on revenue from oil and therefore have formed groups – such as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) – to try to maintain prices at a level that will bring them plenty of profit, but that is not so high that it will depress the economies of consuming countries.