Energy Export Databrowser Updated to BP 2013 Data

The Energy Export Databrowser has been updated to the latest version of the BP Statistical Review. A few charts are provided below the fold that help illuminate the following stories evident in the data:

  1. The US is less reliant on imports from across the globe
  2. UK energy production from all sources continues its decline
  3. Brazil is unlikely to become a major oil exporter

The databrowser is available in the following languages:

Deutsch English Español Français Italiano Nederlands Svensk

Happy Exploring!

A few of the stories found in the data include:

1) The US is less reliant on imports from across the globe

North American oil production (including natural gas liquids) is up while consumption is steady, leading to reduced imports from overseas. Individual components include

  • Increased production of Canadian tar sands.
  • Increased production of US tight oil and gas.
  • Minimal declines in Mexican oil fields.
  • Reduced consumption in the US.

North American oil import trends

2) UK energy production from all sources continues its decline

Excluding alternative fuels, the United Kingdom now produces only 40% of the energy it did in 2000. This is energy poverty on a national scale!

UK energy  production declines

3) Brazil is unlikely to become a major oil exporter

Despite the hoopla a few years a go about Brazil’s offshore, sub-salt discoveries, Brazil looks unlikely to become an oil exporter any time soon.

Brazil oil production trends

Brazil, yes, and Argentina has fallen out of bed too.

Disappointed that BP doesn't pick up New Zealand's small [and declining] production of just under 2000 kilotonnes of oil [v. importing 7000kt].
Not because it's impressive but because it would be a good corrective to the impression our daft BAU-headed government gives of 'causing' more of it through the cunning tricks of slashing both environmental protections and excise duties. To listen to them you'd think we are the next Saudi Arabia not because of geology but through red tape reduction. Idiots.

In fact production, onshore, offshore and fracked, has hovered around current levels for decades, peaking in 2008 with 2800kt. With declining volumes every subsequent year. Which year do you think the govt. likes to talk about?

We are firmly in Importistan with a delusional government.

Also the fact that data browser misses this production I wonder what other inaccuracies there are?

Interesting thanks Patrick.

With the huge amount of extra drilling in Taranaki you would think there would be a corresponding increase in production. Obviously not. Is this just an investment bubble based on hot air and rhetoric?

Well Tag and Anadarko and others are sniffing, but nothing of any scale has shown up yet, and there's been quite a few high profile bailouts. Petrobras left after completing some seismic in deep water off the east coast of the North Island.

We are so far away from everywhere that I doubt even promising finds in tricky ocean seas would prove economic....

Brazil, yes, and Argentina has fallen out of bed too.

Disappointed that BP doesn't pick up New Zealand's small [and declining] production of just under 2000 kilotonnes of oil [v. importing 7000kt].
Not because it's impressive but because it would be a good corrective to the impression our daft BAU-headed government gives of 'causing' more of it through the cunning tricks of slashing both environmental protections and excise duties. To listen to them you'd think we are the next Saudi Arabia not because of geology but through red tape reduction. Idiots.

In fact production, onshore, offshore, and fracked, has hovered around current levels for decades, peaking in 2008 with 2800kt. With declining volumes every subsequent year. Which year do you think the govt. likes to talk about?

We are firmly in Importistan with a delusional government.

Also the fact that data browser misses this production I wonder what other inaccuracies there are?

Wow.

Any other Britons feeling a tad nervous about our future?

Incidentally, how does one convert from million tonnes oil equivalent to cubic feet for natural gas. I would like to get a handle on any potential addition of the much-vaunted Lancastrian shale gas 'revolution' vis-a-vis the amount of gas we are currently importing and NS declines.

BP provides useful conversion factors here.

http://www.bp.com/conversionfactors.jsp

good luck with your shale revolution!

I think you have good reason to be worried. It is not easy to go from selling oil to buying oil. And to make it worse, you sold lots of oil at $20/barrel and now you have to buy oil for $100/barrel.

I think this is a major factor that people are not taking into account when they look at how the UK has been struggling economically in recent years. People debate austerity versus not austerity but they are ignoring this major change.

It is quite interseting to watch graph of fossil fuel production for United Kingdom. During the victorian era production of fossil fuel rised sharply and there places named after princess victoria all over world.

Now the situation is starting to get a little bit different but it is just a few years and they still produce quite a lot of fossil fuel for themself. I know UK also import wood from Sweden. I would be happy to sell wood to UK as a fuel but almost all of it is already used except some of the forks and the stubs so they have to pay a premium.

There are quite few choices: They could reduce consumption, freeze or in the long term they have to do some useful work to get the neccesery money. There is course also the military choice to go what they need from someone weeker. I heard they have quite an impressing collection at british museum from all over world and can only guess how they got them, as gifts in sort of?

The UK graph is absolutely stunning. Y'all better start putting up some more wind turbines ASAP.

The 'good news' on that topic is that for 2012 as a whole wind (on and off-shore) contributed 6% of the entire UK's electrical demand. Considering it was 0.6% a decade ago and there is an astounding hostility to wind turbines in the country it is a small miracle. Sure, 6% is still only 6% but it is meaningful and growing.

HAc
I have been feeling distinctly queasy for 6 or 7 years now.
Be useful to the Germans if we can, might be the name of the game?
I am not sure how much power from wind we could realistically produce eventually but if it were connected to continental grids our peak wind power might be saleable.
These German wind power developments and amazing grid connections could encourage us? http://www.abb.com/industries/ap/db0003db004333/4a9639dc8fc77752c12574ad...

The British Isles are surrounded by shallow windy seas. It is the best offshore wind region in the world.

Props to Jon and the others who make this valuable information so readily available. If we were an intelligent world and nation, we'd use remaining non-renewables to develop renewable sources. Since we're not, the best bet is to individually have some vision and take some actions, and informative posts like this make that possible.

Looking further back, the UK was a major importer in the 60's, peaking in '75, before the North Sea finds. What was the national trend then? Of course it'll be worse to be an importing nation in a world of expensive oil than it was during a time of cheap oil.

Edit: The other difference is UK coal production was still fairly high back then. So it'll be much worse this time around.

Nope. They have decided they are ugly and an eye sore. Two Irish/Uk company's are taking up the options for the the turbines once ordered by UK and hope to install them in Ireland instead.

Thanks again Jon. Your work is much appreciated!

John

Yes, this is good stuff by Jonathan Callahan. He and his company's tools have provided motivation for many people to interact with the data, freeing it up from the static archival sites.

On the climate side, we also have tools such as
WfT : http://WoodForTrees.org ,
ClimateExplorer : http://climexp.knmi.nl
ClimatePlotter : http://moyhu.blogspot.com/p/climate-plotter.html

I am trying to do something similar for environmental and energy modeling, but using a Semantic Web infrastructure.
As a starting point, I created a new blog called Context/Earth which initially has links to documentation and a semantic web portal called the Dynamic Context Server. One of the last pieces I added was a Fossil Fuel view where you can interact with some of the decline models.

The goal is to apply these environmental models to transportation analyses, renewable or alternative energy tradeoffs, etc.

I am beginning to realize that something like this will never be "done" per se, so thought to mention it along with Jon's work.

Add my thanks to Jon and to everybody seriously exploring and expanding relevant data. Indeed let us not forget climate change!

For me, the perverse fascination is looking for countries that have tipped over from being an exporter to importer very recently.

I notice Egypt is one.

I wonder if perodic bulletins of countries that have 'tipped over' and no longer export oil would help with anti-FUD about peak oil and such.

Westexas modeled six countries that recently switched from exporter to importer: Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and United Kingdom.

IUKE + VAM Six Country Model, TOD, Westexas, October 8, 2012

Jonathan,

Thanks for this update!
I have two questions:
- Why is there a difference between the graphs "all fuels" in the "mtoe"-modus end in the "J"-modus. The difference is only in hydro and nuclear. I would expect the conversion between million-tons-of-oil-equivalent and Joule would be the same for every fuel?
- You used to have data on Belgium(&Luxemburg). Being a belgian myself, this used to be interesting. Are those data discontinued becouse BP dropped Luxemburg in there 2013 review?

Best regards,

Bruno

Bruno - are you accounting for the "(38% efficiency)" on the "mtoe" charts for hydro and nuclear?

I guess that this means "the equivalent quantity of fossil fuels required to produce those exajoules of electric energy, assuming a thermal production efficiency of 38%". That is, divide exajoules by 0.38 and then convert to mtoe.

Jon - thanks again for this fantastic resource.

Another story "hidden" in the data: Six of the world's top eight economies have hit peak oil consumption. That's right: the USA, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, and Italy. (China and Brazil are still gaining, but recent news out of them doesn't sound bullish.)

Well . . . you never know. They could eventually surpass the previous peaks. But I find that doubtful in the population declining places like Japan, Germany and Italy.

Those six countries account for 730 million in population. I wonder whether the world's other 6.3 billion are looking to increase their oil consumption?

Yes, a good sign for those countries who are succeeding in reducing their consumption (Except Italy of course, where the decline is mostly due to the economy).

Qatar: They ramped up crude production to above 2 mio. b/d. That was really new to me.

Latest estimates of global fossil fuel resources and reserves, as of June 2013: http://j.mp/FF_RR

Is there a feature to show total world exports? That's a graph I would really like to see. (I get that net earth oil exports are zero and have been for all recorded history. Technically this would be a graph of "total oil crossing a national border" or some such.)

Thanks for everything!

I doubt net oil exports are zero. Net exports are not and neither are net investments.

(This may be traceable to systematic errors by the bean counters!)

Draw an imaginary boundary around the entire earth. Count all barrels of oil crossing the boundary = zero.

The very first plot has net global consumption and production as well as net global exports, i.e. "total oil crossing a national border".

Yup, got it. I'm dumb, apparently.

The 2013 BP statistical review has historical oil production values for most countries that do not match previous numbers back to the year 2000. I would expect some amendments but this seems to be a consistent variation. Does anybody know why these changes have been made. Have BP changed their definitions from 2000 and, if they have, is this mentioned anywhere.

Archived copies of the BP statistical review going back to 2002 are available here.

A cursory review of these data show that BP does update the data from previous years with every release of their Statistical Review. If you look at at a modern, developed nation like Norway, with a tradition of reliable and open national statistics, you will find that the data do not change very much. For other less open nations, e.g. Malaysia, where oil statistics are regarded as part of their national security and traditions of data transparency still in their infancy, the data can change by quite a bit.

Presumably, the folks at BP are gathering information from various sources and putting forth their most reliable estimate. When new, more reliable sources of information become available they change the numbers they had released in previous versions.

Note that I do not have any personal connection to anyone assembling the BP Statistical Review and am only offering a reasonable explanation. But my suggestion is informed by decades of work with federal and state agencies tasked with gathering data and assembling reports. This is simply how assembling a dataset works in the real world.

The late L. F. Ivanhoe discussed BP's methods, 1996. Have they improved?
http://hubbert.mines.edu/news/Ivanhoe_96-1.pdf

Yes, I realise this. But this year there has been a consistent update of oil production numbers from the year 2000 but not before (compare the BP stats tables from 2012 and 2013), with many countries having significant changes and even Norway seeing amendments from 2004 to 2009. Even the UK, which BP should follow closely. I am wondering if BP believe that the numbers have been wrong for a decade since they now match the EIA figures a little better. I know the variations do not matter in the great scheme of things but they do demonstrate how suspect numbers are, especially when BP are taken as a fundamental source by so many. I do my own bottom up figures with definitions fully explained (www.globalshift.co.uk). Thanks for the reply, and I look forward to seeing your further opinions.

I love the Energy Export Databrowser! It's a fabulous resource. Since BP, in its dataset, includes both "Other Renewables" as well as detail by country of energy derived from solar and wind, I'm wondering when the Databrowser might include those numbers in its All Fuels Consumption and Production graphs? For most countries, non-hydroelectric renewables might be negligible, but for some countries, these renewables are necessary to understand their energy situation.

For instance, Denmark now consumes 14% of its energy from solar plus wind, and 20% of its energy from non-hydroelectric renewables in total. The Energy Export Databrowser says Denmark's primary energy consumption decreased last year 9.9%, which is true concerning the energy sources the Databrowser includes. But adding renewables to the total, Denmark's energy consumption decreased only by 7.6%. In addition, Denmark consumed more energy from renewables than coal, and almost as much as natural gas.

Non-hydroelectric renewables make up 10% of Finland's primary energy, 7.9% of Ireland's, 13.8% of Portugal's, 10.3% of Spain's, 8% of Sweden's, 8.3% of Germany's, 6.7% of Italy's, and 10.1% of New Zealand's. Renewables were more important to Italy, Spain, Ireland and Germany than hydroelectric or nuclear; they were more important to Portugal and Denmark than coal, hydro or nuclear; they were more important to Sweden than coal or natural gas. They were more important to China than nuclear, more important to New Zealand than coal or nuclear. In the US, well, we have a long ways to go, though renewables may overtake hydroelectric in a year or two.