Data Is The New Oil - 25.02.2021 Update
Plastic bag consumption, Energy efficiency, US floods, African economies and Oil reserves.
♳ Plastic bag consumption. Eurostat released a new dataset of plastic carrier bag demand, part of an effort to improve data collection in order to reduce plastic usage in Europe. The dataset splits demand by country and bag thickness, but only covers the year 2018. The European Union consumes 45 billion plastic bags per year, or around 100 bags per person. By volume, Spain is the largest consumer, but relative to the size of its population, Latvia is the biggest user with 330 bags per person.
🏠 Energy efficiency. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy released a new dataset showing the number of UK homes receiving a subsidy as part of its £1.5 billion Green Homes Grant voucher scheme. The dataset includes a detailed list of the measures taken and the corresponding number of households. Nearly two-thirds of homeowners have opted for either loft or cavity wall insulation.
🌊 US floods. Researcher Zhi Li published a consolidated database of nearly 600 US flood events from 1900 to the present, using seven different datasets published by US and global institutions. The dataset includes 700k data points in total, and covers the nature of the flood, its location, water height and the distance of each flooded location from the closest river.
📈 African economies. The Bank of France published historical time series in excel of major economic variables (GDP, inflation, external debt, investments, etc) for 14 African economies. The series start in 1991 and end in 2019.
🛢️ Oil reserves. Former Total geologist (and peak oil theorist) Jean Laherrere maintains a database of global oil discoveries and reserves. Proven reserves have gone up in the last few years, but combined proven and probable reserves have not. The peak oil theory was largely debunked in the 2010’s with the rise of US shale.
Other Data Updates
🏥 The Ebola virus has recently made a comeback in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It can be tracked with this dataset of cases and deaths.
❄️ Researchers have estimated the likely evolution of all individual glaciers in the French Alps until 2100 under different climate scenarios.
💾 The Bank of Italy published all the presentations of a recent online seminar on the interaction between big data and markets.
Worth a Read
💨 Decision-making methodologies in offshore wind power investments: A review
A systematic review of methodologies and theories commonly used in offshore wind power investment decision-making.
🚢 Asia LNG Price Spike: Perfect Storm or Structural Failure?
This paper dissects the reasons behind the surge in liquefied natural gas prices experienced over the last few weeks, from supply issues to lack of storage in major Asian consumers and poor spot market liquidity.
☀️ A critical assessment of learning curves for solar and wind power technologies
A thoughtful piece on the widespread use of learning curves in the energy sector. Analysts often apply the concept uncritically when in fact, costs do not move linearly.
♳ Closed-loop recycling of polyethylene-like materials
German scientists devise a promising new method to recycle polyethylene, a major plastic feedstock, chemically.
❄️ Widespread increase in dynamic imbalance in the Getz region of Antarctica
Using satellite observations, researchers find that the change in ice speed and mass balance of the drainage basin of several Antarctica glaciers increased by 24% between 1994 and 2018.
😷 The Impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on the air quality in China: Evidence from a quasi-natural experiment
The Covid-19 lockdown in China led to a significant fall in air pollution. As more time elapsed, the associated reduction in pollution became more significant.
🚗 Prediction of transportation energy demand: Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines
Researchers compare several methods to forecast Turkish transportation demand. Oil price and tonne-kilometre provide the best fit.
🏭 Real-time CO2 emissions estimation in Spain and application to the COVID-19 pandemic
This paper provides a method to estimate emissions of CO2 for each region in Spain based on monthly data published by local authorities.
👓 HVAQ: A High-Resolution Vision-Based Air Quality Dataset
A team of Chinese researchers use images from social media and fixed cameras, in addition to traditional pollution monitoring stations, to improve air quality estimates.
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