Oil and Gas
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 12 articles · Back to full archive
Wind Daily
A single wind turbine blade on the latest offshore machines sweeps an area larger than the London Eye with every rotation, and just one of these turbines can power roughly 20,000 European homes for a full year
Water World
The Three Gorges Dam holds back roughly 39 cubic kilometres of water on the Yangtze, and NASA calculated that shifting that much mass so far above sea level lengthened Earth's day by 0.06 microseconds by nudging the planet's moment of inertia
Solar Science
The Parker Solar Probe now passes within 6.1 million kilometres of the Sun's surface at roughly 692,000 kilometres per hour, fast enough to cross the continental United States in about 20 seconds, protected only by a 11.4-centimetre carbon composite shield that keeps its instruments at room temperature while the front face glows at 1,377 degrees Celsius
Energy Tech
In 1954, engineers at the Obninsk plant southwest of Moscow connected a 5-megawatt graphite-moderated reactor to the Soviet grid and became the first station anywhere to sell nuclear electricity to paying customers, nearly three years before the West managed the same feat at Calder Hall.
Oil and Gas
A pumped-hydro station in Wales moves 7.2 million cubic metres of water up a mountain at night and releases it through six turbines in the morning, delivering roughly 1,728 megawatts to the grid within 12 seconds of the operator pressing the start button
Oil and Gas
In 1901, workers at Spindletop in Texas struck oil at roughly 340 metres and could not cap the well for nine days as it spewed an estimated 100,000 barrels a day, more than every other producing well in the United States combined, and helped launch the age of cheap petroleum
Oil and Gas
Nikola Tesla demonstrated alternating current at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair by lighting 200,000 incandescent bulbs from a single Westinghouse generator, undercutting Edison's DC bid by roughly half and effectively deciding which current would carry electricity into every home on the planet for the next 130 years.
Space Travel
In 1962, NASA's Mariner 1 probe to Venus veered off course and had to be destroyed 293 seconds after launch, and the postmortem traced the failure to a single missing overbar in the guidance code — one hyphen-sized mark that cost roughly $18 million in 1962 dollars.
Oil and Gas
Titan's atmosphere is roughly four times denser than Earth's while its gravity is only one-seventh as strong, which means a human standing on Saturn's largest moon could strap wings to their arms and, in principle, take off under their own muscle power
Oil and Gas
A fossil bed in North Dakota preserves fish with Chicxulub impact glass trapped in their gills, evidence they were alive as asteroid debris fell 3,000 kilometres from the crater during the first hour or two after the strike that ended the age of non-avian dinosaurs
Oil and Gas