A widely published scholar of energy and environmental history, he is the author of The Offshore Imperative: Shell Oil's Search for Petroleum in the Postwar United States (2007), which won the Geosciences in the Media Award from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. He also won the American Society for Environmental History's Alice Hamilton Award for his article, "Extraction Not Creation: The History of Offshore Petroleum in the Gulf of Mexico," in Enterprise & Society (June 2007). He coedited "Oil in America," a special issue of the Journal of American History (June 2012).