Tag: Ecuador

LatAm BEN – Ecuador

Here’s the continuation of my mini-series on Sankey diagrams showing energy balances of Latin American countries. After my recent post on the Balance Energetico Nacional (BEN) of Bolivia the neighbouring Peru would be next. However, I have presented a Sankey diagram on energy flows in Peru on this blog before. So today, here is the BEN for Ecuador. It is published every year by the Ministerio Coordinador de Sectores Estratégicos.


Data is for 2016. The unit of flows is ‘kbep’ (kilo barrels of oil equivalents / miles de barriles equivalentes de petróleo). The appearance is very similar to the BEN Bolivia I showed here.

Again the flows are not to scale, which is a pity. Smaller flow quantities (in the range of 0 to 1000 kbep) are shown as arrows with a minimum width, which is fair, because otherwise we wouldn’t see much more than a hairline for ‘Solar’ or ‘Eólica’. However, if you look at the light grey flow of 17,533 kbep derivates exports branching out after the refineries node, it has the same width as the arrow representing 3,024 kbep of own use (consumo própio) – although it should be 5 times wider. The orange arrow depicting 4,433 kbep of natural gas on the other hand is wider than the one 17,533 kbep derivates exports…

I really like the graphical aspects of the Sankey diagram, and I admire the effort made here to come up with an annual Balance Energetico Nacional. In my opinion, not showing the flows to scale thwarts the whole effort, and makes using this diagram type superfluous. I know that doing such a Sankey diagram to scale is sometimes challenging, in particular when there is a very large dominating flow (like here the 139,046 kbep petroleum exports), but nevertheless, the message you are otherwise conveying with the figure is simply misleading.

Just as for Bolivia I will again have to draw this one myself …