This is only showing trade in WITS by HS6 code
All data from World Bank's WITS.
Volumes are shown as 54PJ (petajoules) per 1,000T of LNG.
Not all countries report in detail (or at all) so we have to try multiple approaches:
| Country | Volume (PJ) |
|---|
| Country | Volume (PJ) |
|---|
Blame is mine, Anthony Baxter. I can be reached on BlueSky, Mastodon, and a bunch of other places.
I've also put up a public tracker for any bugs/suggestions.
Bobbling around in the far in the back of my head was a neat little map/visualisation I remembered from many years ago that was built as a Chrome experiment/demostration, called "arms globe", it showed flows of weapons and ammunition from around the world.
At various times across the years I had had random thoughts about redoing it, but it was the recent launch of war with Iran and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and all the resulting trade shenanigans that made me have another look. I found the code, but as you might expect, code written in around 2010 as an experiment/demonstration of Chrome's new WebGL support was, uh, not exactly current.
Anyway, I managed to get it running again. As I mentioned, the code is from around 2010 - the state of Three.js, WebGL, Javascript and even GL/SL (the C-like language you use to write code that runs on your graphics processor) have moved on.
While I got it working, it didn't really work on mobile (again, WebGL code from 2010, so not a shock).
I started to update the code, and actually found Google's Gemini was reasonably helpful. In the time since the code had been written, a lot of the dependencies had changed. While those changes did have some backwards compat, even the new stuff had newer replacements, and repeat, and after 15 years some core behaviour, types and whatnot had changed. Gemini was reasonably good at trawling through mailing lists and the like to be able to find things like "ah, functionality X was replaced by Y, which was then replaced by Z" and was even reasonably good at snippets showing examples of changes which compressed several different migrations. I spent about a week beetling along with updating it all before I hit a point of "this is just no fun", so dumped it and started again.
The initial data is from the World Bank's WITS (World Integrated Trade Solution) website. There's a number of fun details to know when dealing with it. One is that the data reporting is done by country, and each country might or might not report at all. Or they might report totals, but not broken down by the other country involved (partner is their term - the country you are sending your exports to, or receiving your imports from). Australia is an example of a country that doesn't break their trade out by country. That's OK. What we can instead do is ask "which countries does Australia report exports to" and also "which countries report imports from Australia". In Katherine de Tolly's Bellingcat Stage Talk about trade data, she used the term "mirror trade" to describe this process, and this seems a good name.
Another fun term in use is HS6. This is the numeric indicator for the product. There's quite a lot of them. So LNG (Liquid Natural Gas, the stuff in ships/tankers) is 271111 and dry gas (as in pipes) in 271121. These were the first two I was interested in looking at, hence the name "map2711".
The data from WITS system isn't as granular as I would like, and there's a bunch of interesting looking stuff that doesn't seem to be reported. It's also kinda fiddly to deal with. I'm planning to switch to using the UN Comtrade system in the near future which will make a bunch of things easier.