Adventures in Energy - An Interactive Look at Oil and Natural Gas

This interactive learning tool from the American Petroleum Institute offers a primer on oil and natural gas by providing several animations with explanatory notes covering topics such as: what are oil and natural gas, exploration and production, processing, oil tankers, refining, pipelines, and oil and natural gas in your life. Each section has several parts and includes a short quiz at the end.

Oil Formation

This short animation, part of the Absorb Chemistry for GCSE collection, offers a step-by-step labeled animation of how coal forms and how surveyors find and survey oil domes (i.e. seismic methods).

Oil Formation and Trapping

This animation shows the successive stages in the formation of an oil reserve. In View 1, organic material settles, is buried, and is transformed by heat and pressure into oil. In View 2 an oil trap is formed: the area folds into an anticline, and oil migrates and accumulates in the anticline crest.

How a Nuclear Power Plant Works

This 88-second video from YouTube shows a labeled computer animation of how a nuclear power plant works to create energy.

Nuclear Power Plant Simulator 1.30

This site allows users to download a program in which they simulate running a nuclear power plant. Users learn about energy generation and its limits by walking the fine line between not enough energy produced and nuclear meltdown. The demo version of this program allows users 40 free simulations and a full version (with no simulation limits) is available for purchase.

Nuclear Fission

This short animation from TERC's Exploring Earth visualization collection provides a primer on how nuclear fission works.

Hydrogen Fuel Cell

This short, illustrated and narrated animation from the UK Science Museum provides a basic primer on how fuel cells are constructed and principles behind how they function.

Wind-to-Hydrogen Project

This site describes the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's Wind to Hydrogen Project (Wind2H2). The Wind2H2 project links wind turbines to electrolyzers, which pass the wind-generated electricity through water to split the liquid into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen can then be stored and used later to generate electricity from an internal combustion engine or a fuel cell. The site includes two visualizations, a video describing the project and an animation that demonstrates the system's components.

Geology of Hydrocarbons Visualizations

This site has over two dozen animations about hydrocarbons as energy sources, including where resources are found, the amount of each energy source/type used in the US and in the world, how hydrocarbons are formed, and how they are found by exploration geologists.

The Wind Business

It can take years to plan and engineer a state-of-the-art wind farm. It is a problem-solving process that draws on an understanding of algebra, geometry, kinetic energy, electronics and just about everything in between in order to turn one of our most abundant natural resources into a viable business. This 6-minute video covers several aspects, from the construction and siting, wind analysis, and merging of wind farms with agricultural land use.