For more than a century, the wells of southern Arkansas pumped oil to the surface and dragged something else up with it. That something else was…
Water does not want to go uphill. Everything else in a canal system is a matter of grading and patience, but a mountain range is a…
The road runs along a ridge on the east coast, past a closed park, carrying almost nobody. Across it now lies a steel tube 262 feet…
A length of stainless bar sat on a bench, half an inch across, cut from a single melt. The paperwork that came with it said the…
A valve fitting on a wellhead in southeastern New Mexico looks like nothing from the county road. No sound, no shimmer, no smell worth noticing. What…
The interesting object is not the panels. It is a grey steel cabinet about the size of a large refrigerator, bolted to a concrete pad at…
The optical head turns on its mount, stops, and turns again. Its housing is furred white with salt after months bolted to a deck a hundred…
The rock down there holds more pressure than any producing formation the industry had ever tapped. Above it sits almost a mile of open water, and…
Torches were already lit on the upper deck when the shift settled in. Fog sat on the channel thick enough that nothing was going to fly…
The ponds sit almost at sea level, brackish and still, running flat toward the strait in every direction. Steel frames rise off the earthen berms and…
Three blades came down off an Iowa turbine and did not go to a field. Each of them was longer than a bowling lane by a…
Hydraulic fluid was already spreading across the grating before anyone in the control room knew what had happened. Somewhere above it, on a flanged joint the…
It looks like a piece of burnt newspaper. Matte black, stiff across the flat, and thin enough at the cut edge to pass for card stock.…
Every autumn night across central Germany, something climbs a wind tower that was never designed to receive it. A bat, singing. Then another, and another, circling…
A generation table is a boring document. Rows of fuels, columns of months, numbers that shift a little and mostly stay in the order they were…
In July the fiberglass started arriving on Nantucket beaches, in the middle of the season, in pieces small enough to pick up. It came from fifteen miles…
Both units at the plant were down. No fission, no steam, nothing on the wires, nothing in either core doing what a core does. A quarter…
Steam comes off a supercritical boiler at temperatures that would take your hand off through a glove. It gets piped into a stack of concrete blocks that would…
The lift had gone routine for a while. A crew was lowering the rig’s pressure control stack through the moonpool, the way it is done on…
Thirteen workers were on the fifth floor of the building that runs South Korea’s public services, and the job that night was housekeeping. The battery bank…
Somebody has tied a fine mesh bag over a cactus flower on the Wyoming steppe. The point of the bag is total exclusion. Nothing with wings gets…
There is nothing to look at. A low windowless box on a gravel pad, sagebrush pushing up to the edge of the grading, a bank of…
The machine had already survived the hard part. It stood in a test bay in Rossington, wired up and pressurized, working through the last gate it had to…
At low tide on a February morning, an excavator crawled to the far west end of Summerland Beach and started digging a pit in wet sand.…
Twice a day the sea walks off the Changhua coast and leaves a gray plain of mud behind it. The panels come down with the water.…
A cracked panel lying in wet grass does not look like a chemistry problem. Glass in a web of fractures, a bent frame corner, rain sitting…
At 9:47 on a Thursday morning the plant was doing what it does. Full power, steam to the turbine hall, the grid taking everything it made.…
There is a glass flask clamped under a pipe in most pyrolysis plants. What drips into it is almost black and thick enough to hang before…
A flare stands over the creeks of the Niger Delta and burns all night, the way it has burned since before most people under it were…
Smoke went up from a flat roof. It was the middle of a June afternoon, and within a couple of hours the column had grown wide…
On a humid night in June a film of water forms on a corn leaf. It is invisible from the road and it is the whole opportunity a…
Drive out of a small Wyoming town and the first thing that appears is a steel frame. Behind it sits a fenced rectangle of graded dirt with survey…
The aircraft climbs to survey altitude just after dawn and turns onto the first line. Below, nothing looks wrong. Pump jacks nod, tank batteries sit on…
Twelve towers stand along the summit of a ridge in the Berkshires, hubs 262 feet off the ground. Below them sits a town of fewer than 1,000 people.…
A truckload of retired solar panels arrives at an industrial lot in west Texas. The paperwork says recycling. The destination is licensed and the labels are correct.…
At 2:49 in the morning the control room lost both pumps at once. Not one. Both. A boiling water reactor will run on a single recirculation…
The old cooling canal was never meant to raise anything. It was dug to shed heat, pulling Mississippi River water past a nuclear plant’s machinery. But…
The water turns a flat dead indigo about two hours out from the coast. Then the bottom falls away. More than a mile under the hull…
On a dry morning in central New Mexico the indicators in a control room flipped from testing to live. Nearly a thousand turbines started feeding the…
Ten thousand feet up, on a plateau where the wind has scoured the ground for centuries, the grass is now over knee high. It is growing so well that…
The offer went out and nothing came back. Any town in the state could raise its hand, take money to study whether it wanted a reactor,…
The derrick barely clears the horizon from any angle. Below the ship, a mile of black water. Below that, more than seven miles of rock. Somewhere…
A cylinder of rolled plate hangs upright over open water, 75 miles from land. It is 295 feet long, and it weighs 1,841 tons. Below it there…
There is a fence, and there is a soybean field on the other side of it. Inside the fence, rows of dark panels stand over waist high…
The cylinder hangs level, a few feet above an open concrete shaft. It is 43 feet long, about 15 feet across, and it weighs 367 tons. The…
A flame has been standing above a clearing in the Gabonese interior for years. It heats nothing. It lights nothing. Nobody is billed. Underneath it a…
A wire fence runs across a high plateau in Chubut, Argentina, and it was put there for industrial safety. Behind it stand wind turbines, a gravel service…
A volunteer settles into a chair in a psychology lab at Princeton and stares at a blank screen. Two faces flash up side by side, then…
Stand at the foot of the shell at Lianjiang and the thing above you does not read as a building. It reads as a horizon that…
In Oyigbo the air stops people at their own front doors. A sulfurous wall rolls off the nearby oil facility before the town is fully awake.…
