LatAm BEN – Colombia

Colombia is next in my mini-series on National Energy Balances (Balance Energético Nacional, BEN) of countries in South and Central America.

Searching for an energy flow chart for Colombia brought up a lot of data and publications by UPME (Unidad de Planeación Minero Energético), an agency of the Ministerio de Minas y Energía (MinMinas). However, finding an actual energy flow chart turned out to be more difficult. I finally found one for 2012 in a presentation ‘Potencial energético colombiano para la generación de energía y su óptimo aprovechamiento’ by UPME on a U.S. National Institute of Standards (NIST) website.

With Colombia being an energy exporter, they seem to have been facing the same problems as Bolivia and Ecuador when drawing the Sankey diagram: The comparatively much larger energy export quantity kind of dwarfed the other flows of the Sankey diagram. Hence, in the same presentation, they excluded the export stream and focused on the domestic energy flows.

Flows are in terajoules (TJ) for the year 2012 in both diagrams. The scale of the two diagrams is not the same, so they must not be compared to each other. What has been reduced to tiny streams and hairlines by the massive export flow in the first diagram, received more weight in the domestic energy flow diagram.

A good solution to a general issue when handling flows with huge differences in the same Sankey diagram.