The Alchemists -history of oil
How oil built the world
energy
Form Energy and its iron batteries
Form’s 100-hour batteries could make clean energy more weather-resilient and help power data centers.
Explosion Inside!
The story of internal combustion, part 1.
Terraform Industries
Sunlight into methane for fracking prices
The Gas Turbine Supply Chain
Look into how gas turbines work, the challenges, the manufacturing process, and the supply chain involved.
Graphite Electrodes: The Six-Month Carbon Behind Electric Steel and Lithium Batteries
Electric furnaces make 30% of the world's steel, 46% of the EU's and 71% of the US's, every tonne burns through a graphite column that takes half a year to produce, and battery anodes are made from the same coke in the same furnaces.
US Energy Data: a new platform to explore American energy, state-by-state
Trying to make some of the richest energy data in the world accessible and understandable.
The Side Door · Solstice No. 10
Nobody stops the barrels now.
What is Cherenkov Radiation?
Cherenkov radiation is a form of energy that we can perceive as a blue glow emitted when the electrically charged particles that compose atoms.
Unlimited Power? The Sodium Gambit
Whatever happened to the fast breeder reactor...
Thorium is a marshmallow test.
China & India are sitting on millenia of fuel. The West keeps eating the marshmallow.
The Rockefeller of solar
No drilling required
Sodium-cooled fast reactor
Small modular reactors
Lead-cooled fast reactors!
Fusion power!
British nuclear
Hydraulic fracturing & drilling for gas
Geothermal power
The Alchemists
How oil built the world
Oil Refining, explained — Post factum
The Geopolitics of Black Sludge Processing
Inside the First U.S. Aluminum Smelter in 46 Years
The first new U.S. primary smelter since 1980. What it is, how it works, and where its inputs come from.
Forgotten Atlas - Heat exchangers
Heat Exchangers: Designing the titans that hold up our world.
The Great Chinese Oil Mystery
America’s greatest rival is single-handedly averting a global energy crisis. No one knows how the country is doing it—or why.
Yamal LNG: The Plant Built at the End of the Earth
A liquefaction plant at 71°N, built on 60,000 piles in permafrost, producing around 4% of the world's traded LNG.
Drill For Victory!
Why fracking is the most steampunk thing ever.
Converting Coal Plants to Natural Gas
For the better part of the last several hundred years, coal was the fuel of choice for generating power.
Black Gold and Grey Markets
Adventures in energy trading
Jones act waiver data reveals universe blocked american trade
How an Oil Refinery Works
Though wind and solar continue to carve out larger and larger shares of world energy supply, the modern world still runs on petroleum, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
We can look at the relative complexity of different US refineries using the Nelson Complexity Index, which is intended to measure how complex a refinery is
average complexity index was 8.7
Choosing the Most Cost-Effective Option for Nuclear Power
Interest in nuclear power has surged recently as policymakers realize that managing electric grids dominated by intermittent renewable sources is far more technically and economically challenging than initially anticipated.
Turbine Tuesday: The 60-Year Promise of Supercritical CO2
Why the 'world changing fluid' keeps ~almost~ working
In Edison’s Revenge, Data Centers Are Transitioning From AC to DC
Could switching to 800 V DC be the key to more efficient data centers?
How AI Labs Are Solving the Power Crisis: The Onsite Gas Deep Dive
Bring Your Own Generation, Sayonara Electric Grid, Turbines vs. Recips. vs. Fuel Cells, Why Not Build More CCGTs?, Onsite Power TCO
Energy Predictions 2025
Printable pdf. It’s been a few years since I wrote a broad post on energy, so I’m providing an update in one easy to read place. More detailed specific posts on energy are here. If you want t…
This power source is 15,000 ft below the ground | Bill Gates
A company called Fervo Energy is hoping to supercharge geothermal power with an innovative new approach to turning the earth’s heat into power.
Liberté, égalité, radioactivité
France built forty nuclear reactors in a decade. Here's what the world can learn from it.
Building Ultra Cheap Energy Storage for Solar PV
Solar still needs storage cheap enough to move energy between seasons. I have been working on a startup to do this for the last two years.
The precious 'white gold' buried in the Earth
Naturally occurring "white hydrogen" lies in vast reservoirs beneath our feet – now the gold rush of the clean energy era is beginning.
Stellantis abandons hydrogen fuel cell development
Fast filling times are seductive, but they don’t compensate for H2’s many drawbacks.
Hydrogen is also much less energy-dense by volume, and making the stuff is far from efficient, even when you use entirely renewable electricity. And of course, the vast majority of commercial hydrogen is not so-called blue hydrogen, which was made with renewables but is instead mostly produced via…
Exclusive: Tulum Energy rediscovered a forgotten hydrogen tech and used it to raise $27M | TechCrunch
Results of a 20-year-old curiosity now form the basis of Tulum, a startup that has attracted significant investor attention.
Age of Invention: All Fired Up
The mystifying, centuries-long failure of the coal briquette
Record-Breaking Results Bring Fusion Power Closer to Reality
Breakthroughs from two rival experiments, Germany’s Wendelstein 7-X and the Joint European Torus, suggest the elusive dream of controlled nuclear fusion may be within reach
Firewood in the American Economy: 1700 to 2010 - Marginal REVOLUTION
Despite the central role of firewood in the development of the early American economy, prices for this energy fuel are absent from official government statistics and the scholarly literature. This paper presents the most comprehensive dataset of firewood prices in the United…
How Batteries Are Making the Electrical Grid More Reliable
To operate reliably, the US electrical grid needs to balance supply and demand: to make sure, at any given moment, that the amount of electricity demanded by homes, businesses, and factories is equal to the amount being supplied by nuclear reactors, gas turbines, and other types…
Evari turns to rocket science to solve problems with heat pumps
The startup emerged from stealth with a goal of extending the range of EVs while also eliminating fossil fuels from home heating.
Big gas turbine manufacturers aren’t ready to bet on the AI boom
Demand for gas power-generation hardware is surging, but the few companies that make it are reluctant to scale up.
Data center energy consumption
Steam networks - Works in Progress
New York's skyscrapers soar above a century-old steam network that still warms the city. While the rest of the world moved to hot water, Manhattanites still buy steam by the megapound.
How We Got the Lithium-Ion Battery
It took decades of research, performed around the world, before a practical lithium-ion battery was possible.