Unit of flows is TWh. The orange arrows are imports, the other arrows from the left apparently domestic production, with the majority of energy being from fossil fuels (“Fossilt”). Consuming sectors are at the bottom – in contrast to the typical layout of this kind of energy balance diagrams.

Anyone from Sweden who wishes to comment and explain a little bit?

The Sankey diagram shows cargo flights supposedly loaded with arms, from Doha and Riyadh (among others) to Turkey, and from Zagreb to Amman. All supposedly destined for onward transport to Syria. The “arrow widhts are proportional to the number of flights”.
An additional 2012/2013 time line shows the flight dates and their density. Interesting. One mustn’t confuse the Sankey arrows with number of arms being transported, as there might have been different planes and consequently different cargo loads.

Now I think I should also be looking for a “civil” version, with pax being transported on commercial airline flights.

Download the full book on ResearchGate.

Not sure about the unit of flows.The unit of flows is kT CO2-eq./year (see comment by Christian Solli). The Sankey diagram shows embodied carbon in food and agricultural products and the overall carbon footprint caused by the demand of food in Norwegian households, and consequently along the supply chains in agriculture/fisheries sector. [Updated by phineas, May 06]

This is very similar to Jason Pearson’s Economy Maps for visualizing environmental impacts.

Gabriel writes:

“[This Sankey diagram] illustrates the measures of capacity and exchange of water in the Sacramento/American river confluence. Sankey diagrams are an essential constructive framework to analyze the breaching processes and estimate the manipulated water flows. The work is supported with calculations derived from California Department of Water Resources measurements as a means to describe where flows become broken, crosswired, appropriated, or out of tolerance. While the Sankey should hold a useful matrix to describe a section of a closed system, the Sacramento/American River measurements describe a broken system of flows in which the input of 100% on the top end results in disrupted quantities of output.”

A similar diagram for the Colorado river catchement can be seen here.

Issaquah is one of ‘New Energy Cities’ in the Northwest that has created an Energy Map and calculates the carbon emissions it is responsible for based on the fuels used. The role model for these Sankey diagrams are the ones published by the EIA.

Elizabeth, the author of the post, writes:

“Total carbon emissions are depicted in the gray flow lines, by both source and end use. The blue flow line represents hydropower energy used for electricity generation; the green represents non-hydropower renewable energy used for electricity generation; the brown represents nuclear energy used for electricity generation; and the red represents coal energy used for electricity generation. The orange flow lines represent natural gas used for electricity generation and direct heating. The pink flow line represents petroleum used for transportation. The dark gray flow lines represent electricity consumption by residential, commercial, and industrial user categories.”

Wow! I’ve seen those energy Sankey diagrams for the world, for nations and for federal states. But this one for Issaquah is definitely the one that covers the smallest geographical and administrative entity.

Well, I am waiting anxiously for this new product release, and have prepared my sleeping bag to camp out the night at the doors of the retail shop to be the first to get hold of it.

Happy april fools day!

The study features two Sankey diagrams that show the present situation (2010) and a an alternative scenario, where much of the materials are recovered.

This is the current situation in which only 25% of the 3.16 Mt of waste (Building C&D Waste not considered) are recycled.

The authors explain that

“Each year Connecticut residents and businesses generate more than three million tons of munici pal solid waste (MSW, or “regular trash”). Currently existing recycling and reuse programs capture a portion of the value of Connecticut’s waste, while waste-to-energy facilities process and recover energy from most of the MSW that is not recycled. With our recycling infrastructure underutilized, and resource recovery facilities at capacity, there is vast potential to transform our management and processing systems to further unlock the economic potential of waste.”

The optimized scenario with much increased recycling of materials (almost 80%) is shown in this diagram:

Connecticut is looking into the environmental and economic benefit of a recycled materials econonmy.

via Talismark blog

As he describes on his blog these were created during a “Hackathon de Visualizaciones” in Buenos Aires. Andy used ‘Sankey by tamc’ (see Sankey software list) to create several diagrams like these.

This one is for the Santa Cruz province and covers elections 1983 through 2011. More images like these for the Chaco, San Juan and Jujuy provinces are available. These are sample screenshots from the ‘Electoral Atlas’ (see below).

Each node represents elections, with the height of the block representing the percentage of votes/seats received. The “leading” party is always at the top. So the bands between two blocks are basically electoral behaviour and (may) visualize political shifts. When two bands join, there seems to be a coalition.

In this special type of Sankey diagram the nodes are of greater importance. The bands represent quantities, however there is a temporal rather than directional aspect to the flows.

This is similar to the Political Parties in Slowakia diagram and to these.

Check the interactive version of the ‘Electoral Atlas’ by Andy Tow, where you can hover the mouse over the diagram to highlight details.

WRAP now presented their vision for a circular economy in the United Kingdom by 2020, using Sankey diagrams:

The material flows for the baseline year 2000 are shown in a first diagram here:

In that year, apparently, 212 Mt of material were disposed of as waste (orange arrow), while only 47 Mt were recycled.

The situation in 2010…

… and the vision for 2020 (from this page):

The goal is to use less input materials, to reduce waste output and to recycle 3/4 of the materials.

See diagrams in high resoultion directly on their website.

Tony Hirst from OUseful.info created it after seeing a map-based diagram for horse meat trade flows on the Guardian Data Blog. Tony used Mike Bostock’s D3s Sankey Plugin that allows creating this type of diagrams directly from data in Excel/CSV files. In his post he describes how he proceeded to build this Intra EU Horse Meat Trade diagram. Somewhat techie, but nevertheless makes an interesting read.

Overall trade quantity was more than 60.000 tonnes in 2012. Largest exporters are Belgium and Poland (left side), largest importers are Italy and France (right side). Data is from Eurostats.

The above is a only a static picture, but you can go here to play around with the interactive version. Data labels and quantities are available in the interactive version when you hover ths mouse over certain bands. You can also move the nodes up and down vertically and group the countries differently.

This special type of Sankey diagram is also refered to as distribution diagram and (…hate to say it in light of the current scandal) a Spaghetti diagram. Fineo and Parsets (see software list) can also be used for this type of diagrams where statistical data is grouped into categories (here: exporting and importing countries) and bands/streams/spaghettis are shown between the categories to represent the relationships between them.

Here is my May 2012 post on distribution diagrams with d3.js.

It is titled ‘Nigeria and the Freswater Challenge’, originally from a 2005 study by the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI).

The description says:

Out of the total precipitation reaching Nigeria, it can be separated into green and blue water. Green water (79% of the precipitation) represents the fraction of rainfall that generates soil moisture and which supports terrestrial ecosystems. It is not returned to groundwater and rivers, but will eventually evaporate or transpire through plants. Blue water, on the other hand, represents the fraction (21%) of the precipitation that runs into rivers and aquifers, and that has a potential for withdrawal for societal use. Out of this, the environmental water flow is the amount of water needed to sustain ecosystem services. In the case of Nigeria, there is a huge potential to increase the withdrawal for irrigation and food production to meet current and future needs.

Flows display percentages rather than absolute values. The green water arrow representing 79% is broken down further and reveals the contributions, but only on one segment. Nice idea!

It has the typical structure of a national energy flow Sankey diagram as I have shown here on the blog many times. Flows are in terajoule (TJ) and have a general left-to-right orientation. On the left are the different energy carriers (primary energy), conversion in the middle section, consuming sectors on the right. Losses branch out to the bottom.

Unfortunately the streams are not to scale in this Sankey diagram. Compare for example the 80.149 TJ energy from “leña” (wood) in green to the 515.929 TJ of energy embodied in gas (sand color) right above. The gas arrow should be approximately 6 times wider – still it is drawn thinner. Even worse the situation for losses in gas processing where 241.007 TJ are “no aprovechada” while 274.922 TJ pass through gas processing (“planta de gas”). Roughly half of the energy embodied in gas is not used, but it looks as if that arrow branching out to the bottom represents some 10 to 15% of the total flow only. Many other examples of wron arrow magnitudes can be found.

So, some very general basics of Sankey diagrams are ignored here. Readers should check the flow quantities carefully, and not rely on the perceived quantities represented by the arrows.

Promise I will make more Sankey diagrams!

This is a MFA diagram on Iron and Steel Flows in the European Union in 2000 as found in this post. Original data is from a 2008 OECD study, flows in Mt.

The description of the diagram says: “A study of iron and steel flows in 2000 in the European Union showed that an input of about 120 Mt of iron ore (of which 98 Mt was imported) yielded 98 Mt of primary crude steel (i.e. produced directly from iron ore and coke). A further 65 Mt, representing 40% of total crude steel production, were produced as secondary crude steel, produced from scrap steel.”

I did a first quick version of the flows as Sankey diagram, trying to stick very much to the layout of the original diagram. All nodes are the same size and more or less located at the position of the master. It already shows that the main steel flows: iron ore imported into the European Union, and steel scrap being recycled within the EU. Export of semi-finished steel products from the EU to the Rest of World (52 Mt) almost balanced with 47 Mt of semi-finished steel products imported into the EU.

I tried to improve the diagram by removing the three nodes ‘New Scrap’, ‘Prompt Scrap’ and ‘End of Life products’ since there is no transformation of these flows at the nodes (also no change in quantity). Further I reduced the size of some boxes and dragged the ‘Semi-finished Products’ (Rest of World) box closer to the ‘Finished Steel Products’ (European Union) box to avoid crossing streams. Wherever possible I try to avoid diagonal arrows.

The final result also has the Rest of World and European Union grouping. I am not to happy with the colors though.

Your thoughts?

This is for a bus operating on the University of Delaware campus. The Sankey diagram shows energy flow and losses in the hybrid power train for a typical drive cycle. Unit is Wh, percentages are given in the labels as additional information. Energy is recovered when braking and is fed back to the battery (see upstream arrow ‘Energy Recovery’).

“The fuel cell system balance of plant consumes a significant fraction of the energy of the hydrogen supplying the stack, so efficiency gains there are potentially quite useful. Most of the balance of plant energy feeds the air compressor, so efficiency could be increased by improving air humidification to allow lower air system backpressure”

Simple black and white diagram with a top-down orientation. The only extra that does not serve to carry information is the schematic road figuring at the bottom….

For the full publication check Bubna P., Brunner D., Gangloff Jr. J.J., Advani S.G., and Prasad A.K., “Analysis, operation, and maintenance of a fuel cell/battery series-hybrid bus for urban transit applications,” Journal of Power Sources, Vol. 195, pp. 3939-3949, June 15, 2010. doi:10.1016/j.jpowsour.2009.12.080