Molly is an Architecture/Sustainable Design graduate student at the University of Minnesota. From August 15 to November 22, 2010 she tried to live a fully-no-oil life style.

By using myself as a research tool I can easily document all aspects of my life and how they might be affected in this not-to-distant world. I’ll be tracking my life in seven categories: Transportation, Food, Waste, Water, Electricity, Health/Hygiene, and Communication/Entertainment.

Her self-set rules were quite strict, and I personally think that the water use part is the hardest constraint. Read more about the criteria of this experiment.

The Sankey diagram is based on data from the Energy Information Administration Annual Energy Review 2008, but has been expanded on the right side with examples for the seven categories she identified for her project.

This post on the Infantile Disorder blog is deep-linking the Sankey diagram, to my disappointment without mentioning the source, and – even worse – without stating that these are 2006 figures.

The idea of presenting oil exports as a Sankey diagram has also been taken up by AFP Infographic Service in Germany. They did their homework and updated the values with data from the International Energy Agency. Instead of simple Sankey arrows, the info graphic shows oil pipes with a diameter representing the percentage values. An oil drop can be seen at the mouth of each pipe… Unfortunately this material is copyrighted, so I won’t feature it here. But you might want to check out the AFP Infographic on Libya Oil Export Sankey on the news portal of N24.

You can see the oil imports to the United States from January 1973 to August 2008 on a map that depicts the flow quantities as Sankey arrows linking the country of origin and the U.S. If you switch to the unit “Dollar”, you can see the value of the oil imported depicted as Sankey arrows.

One can play the the whole 35-year period as a movie, or use the slider on the time line to see individual months. The data used is from publicy accessible EIA/DOE statistics.

The United States is still 60 % dependent on imported oil. MRI’s MOVE project seeks possibilities to reduce foreign crude oil dependencies. The goal is to “get completely off oil by 2050, led by business for profit.”

Go to the RMI movie page and try it yourself. When I did the Lybia Oil Export map last year I wasn’t aware of this Sankey movie, which is of course much nicer.

I wanted to do a Saudia-Arabia or Irak oil export Sankey map, but couldn’t find good data. I finally came across this summary on Lybian oil exports, and converted the data from the pie chart Lybian Oil Exports, by Destination, 2006 to a Sankey style export flow diagram.

It was new to me that “Libya has the largest proven oil reserves in Africa” with 41.5 billion barrels, and estimated net exports of 1.525 million barrels per day in 2006.

The underlying map is a crop from a World map found on Wikicommons. I think it could be a little more transparent though…