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.

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.

The U.S. produces over 90 billion cubic feet of natural gas every day. The average home uses about 200 cubic feet per day.

You may come across different kinds of crude (i.e. crude oil) in your reporting, such as Brent Crude or West Texas Intermediate.

Get to know who they are and have them show you around – this will help you get information more quickly when a crisis breaks.

The way of life in communities all over the U.S. is being transformed by new techniques in oil drilling.

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.

Biofuels are made out of (recently) living organisms – such as plants and animals. Traditional biofuels are ethanol made out of sugar cane or corn, and biodiesel is made of soy, animal fat, or palm oil. Cellulosic biofuels are the next generation: produced en masse from vegetable waste.