Like many people, I recently purchased my first Nest home thermostat. Being an analytics junkie at heart, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on my energy consumption data and analyze it with Qlik Sense. Due to unforeseen circumstances, however, this was a little more complicated than I thought it would be, so I will save that for a future post! I began to think: What other sources of energy analysis can I apply this thinking to? With the increased number of open data sources these days, I began looking into open data collected by the U.S. Government, to investigate our dependency on oil. In should be noted here that I have no particular training or experience in the energy field, I simply wanted to explore the publicly available data and see how much I could learn from my own insights.

Selection by Petroleum

Figure 1

In the 1970’s, there were around 4 billion fewer people on earth (114 million less in the US alone) and certainly fewer motor-vehicles in use. I would have guessed that such a massive increase in population and motor-vehicle usage since then would have seen a correspondingly massive shift in oil use, but the data doesn’t support this. This surprised me!

Production over the last decade has been slowly decreasing, as highlighted in Figure 2. Since 2008, the Obama Administration has focused on reducing dependency on foreign oil. Does the data reflect this?

Selection Petroleum:

Figure 2

Yes. No surprises here: we can see that the production of oil has increased in the past few years. But when I looked at the analysis of production vs. consumption, I was surprised:

Figure 3

Figure 2 shows production was constant from 1978 through to 1983 and then gradually decreased from 1985 through to 2008. However, Figure 3 shows that there was a severe decrease in consumption from 1978 through to 1983. Why? I had to Google this and it turns out that widespread panic in the wake of the Iranian Revolution resulted in oil prices being driven far higher than justified supply as according to Wikipedia.

Figure 4

Figure 4 depicts consumption to domestic production. As the chart from 2007 to 2014 shows a climb towards 0, the fact that we are consuming more domestic oil than we are consuming foreign oil is highlighted. In my opinion, this is good for the country and is a direct reflection of the Obama Administration’s success in moving away from foreign oil dependency.

Figure 5

Notice that in Figure 5, the biggest form of energy consumption is Petroleum (Excluding Biofuels), followed closely by Natural Gas and Coal. Interestingly, from the 1970’s through to the early 80’s, we consumed more natural gas than coal; from 1985 to 2006, we consumed equal amounts of both; and from 2006 onwards, we have been consuming less and less coal every year. Despite this, coal production today remains high, as per Figure 6, which leads me to believe we must be selling it over-seas.

Figure 6

I would like to believe that we will eventually move away from needing any fossil fuels at all. I believe the future is in renewable energy, which means wind, hydro, solar, and biomass.

When I first started looking at renewable energy sources, I expected that hydro and solar power would be the main players. I was right about hydro, but biomass was actually the other leading resource type and has seen the biggest increase in production (Figure 7).

Figure 7

But also notice Figure 8 is identical to Figure 7 for consumption. We’re consuming as much as we are producing.

Figure 8

So what is this telling us?

Are we self-sufficient on production and have no need to import foreign renewable energy types? Is the demand for renewable energy higher than production? If we produce more, will we consume more of the renewable energy type and potentially move away from fossil fuels? Looking at the data, is there a clear winner in renewable energy? Is there an area we should focus and invest more in?

It’s virtually impossible for the human mind to find insight and trends in the sheer volumes of data collected every day. We are doubling data collected every 2 years – an unprecedented rate. Platforms like Qlik Sense help us analyze, make discoveries and find insight so that we can take action.

What are your thoughts on the future of energy production and consumption?