An illustration of the energy impasse in Washington - former U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan, speaking last week during a "Conversations with Power" panel discussion at the Newseum:

"We are a country with 3 percent of the world's oil reserves, we're 5 percent of the population, we produce 10 percent of the world's oil and use over 20 percent of the world's oil. ... We need a new energy policy that makes us less vulnerable, less oil intensive. ... We're going to have to have a price on carbon. ... We're always going to need fossil energy and use fossil energy. We need to use it differently. We're too oil-centric. ... We could wake up some morning and discover that the energy with which we run our economy doesn't exist or the supply was interrupted and we'd be in big trouble."

Then there's the U.S. C... more »

PoliticoPro reports that a New York state advisory panel on hydraulic fracturing is taking flak from some environmentalists despite the fact a majority of the committee's members are ... environmentalists.

There's a simple explanation: Some of these folks just aren't all that interested in helping a process that will bring more natural gas - clean-burning, abundant, affordable - to U.S. Here's what David Braun, co-founder of United for Action, a New York-based anti-fracking group, told PoliticoPro:

"The environmental groups that are involved are too interested in regulating rather than serving their general purpose, which is to defend our resources, defend the people and to not push these sorts of things through."

Braun refers to hydraulic fracturing, the drilling technology that's revolut... more »

President Obama's Twitter town hall yesterday was pretty neat - the Tweeter-in-Chief fielding questions from the public on a range of issues, including some on energy. The president trumpeted renewable energies while saying America needs to reduce dependence on oil. More on that below. First, some interesting context on renewables, from a live chat held last week by the Energy Department. Dr. Arun Majumdar, director of the department's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, responded to the public's emails and Tweets for about 45 minutes. You can check out the video here. Key takeaways on renewables:

• Futuristic technologies, including biofuels, electrofuels and powerful car batteries, remain just that: in the future. "The technologies that are required to make us secure ... all of them... more »

At API, we've been saying for many years that the United States needs a broad portfolio of energy, including oil, natural gas, nuclear, coal, and a wide variety of alternatives such as solar and wind. Some are best used to generate electricity with the existing infrastructure, while oil is necessary to provide liquid fuels for transportation.

In fact, there is no other energy source that provides as much bang for the buck as oil. It is energy dense, portable, and flexible. It can be refined into gasoline, diesel, and petrochemicals that provide feedstocks for a myriad consumer products, including medicines.

As consumers, we often take energy for granted, but it makes sense to pause a moment and consider how fortunate we are. The United States has natural resources that have kept this count... more »

On this blog, we strive to provide an informative, timely and fair discussion about a variety of energy-related topics. In the spirit of those ideals, I recently came across another energy discussion forum on Chevron's website--willyoujoinus.com.

Since launching the discussion area in September, willyoujoinus.com is now hosting eight different energy discussion areas that range from access to alternative energy, providing an outlet for everyone to discuss these important issues.

For example, user "jgotthold" offered this information about alternative energy projects to the discussion:

"On almost a daily basis, scientists announce some nanotechnology breakthrough which has the potential to improve fuel cells, hydrogen storage, wind power development, tidal wave development and all the oth... more »