At that depth, a key piece of equipment is the blowout preventer, which weighs up to 300 tons and caps the well, holding back ultrapressurized (15, 000 pounds per square inch) oil deep in the Earth.
And while the amount of coal consumed by American power generators is down about 15% from the 1 billion tonsper year average of the 2000s, the EIA expects the domestic coal burn to inch up to 859 million tons in 2013 and 870 million in 2014.