Data Is The New Oil - 10.04.2021 Update
Canadian tar sands, Global forestry, US mobility and Bunker consumption.
🛢️ Canadian tar sands. Researcher Minxing Si retrieved operating fuel use data from a public repository that contains more than 35 million records for 18 oil sands projects, and summarised it in a helpful data sheet. The analysis shows that these projects are very energy hungry, with average annual energy intensities ranging from 0.3 to 1.2 tonne CO2e per extracted cubic metre. Tar sands are some of the dirtiest oil projects in existence. Unlike other crude oils, they do not flow out of the ground and instead involve the processing of a bitumen like substance with steam and heavy boilers (themselves fed with fossil fuels).
🌴 Global forestry changes. Researchers including Matthew Hansen maintain a database of global forestry changes extracted from NASA Landsat satellite images. The latest version of the file includes the period 2000-2020. The same data can be easily consulted on the Global Forestry Watch website. Separately, researchers Olga Danylo et al recently published a GeoTIFF map of palm oil plantation in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand (which represent 90% of global production) using data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel 1 programme. They were able to pinpoint the average age of each plantation, which is helpful in determining whether they contributed to recent deforestation.
🚗 US mobility. The US Department for Transport maintains several up-to-date datasets on the impact of Covid-19 on US transportation and mobility. The latest data shows that Americans are on the move once again following the reduction in Covid cases and the rapid rollout of vaccines. Trips in the neighbourhood are already up to pre-pandemic levels, but long-distance travel remains lower.
🛳️ Bunker consumption. Fujairah, the world’s second largest refuelling port situated in a strategic location between Asia and Europe, started publishing monthly data on bunker deliveries. Singapore and Rotterdam, respectively the first and third largest bunker ports, were already publishing such data, so we now have much better statistics on global bunkering. The full data record is not kept online and you will need to scrape the latest figures once a month in order to build a time series.
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