Each country is colored by its production in the year on the player, in the unit shown, on a continuous log scale between the legend’s printed ends. A country left plain has no figure in the file for that year, which is not the same as zero, or produced nothing; its card says which. The map hatches nothing. A former state (the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia) has no outline of its own: in any year it has a figure and its largest member has none, its successor states that report nothing of their own that year (no figure, or zero) are drawn together as one shape in its color, named and opened as the former state; once its largest member’s series begins, each is drawn by its own.
The strip under the map, the Ledger, is the world’s output for the year shown laid out as shares: one block per producing country, widest first, each as wide as its figure over the world’s (the file’s World series, energy-equivalent, as the Energy Institute publishes it), and every producer under 1 % together in the hatched end. Tap a block for that country’s card. In Cumulative each block is the country’s total to the year shown. A former state (the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia) gives way to its members in any year its largest member (Russia, Czechia, Serbia) has a figure of its own, so no barrel is counted twice; in Cumulative the former state’s block is what it produced until then, and its label says to which year. The Ledger says nothing about reserves, consumption, or who owns the fields.
The year player moves the countries only: their series are measured year by year. Each field is a dot in its fuel’s color, as the tracker records it: a ring from its discovery year, filled from its production start, or from its discovery when no start is given; units with neither date appear, filled, the year before their data year. A pale dot: the tracker reports no figure for the fuel shown. Every filled disc has a thin rim, which keeps a gas disc apart from a country or a sea of its own lightness; Map layers can turn the rims off. The tracker’s outlines are drawn when zoomed in; a ring that does not fall near its own unit is left out.
For the North Sea’s fields measured through time, see Shelf Atlas.
Cumulative adds up every year from the first with data to the year shown: a year with no data adds nothing, and a series that has ended keeps its total. Play runs eight years a second.
Terrain shading lays the relief on land; Depth shading darkens the sea with depth and lights its floor from the northwest, from a global grid, finer over seven oil and gas regions (the North Sea and the Norwegian shelf, the Gulf of Mexico, the Persian Gulf, West Africa, Brazil’s margin, the South China Sea and the Caspian). Both are for orientation, not navigation.
Sea floor (Depth shading)GEBCO Bathymetric Compilation Group 2026(2026). The GEBCO_2026 Grid - a continuous terrain model for oceans and land at 15 arc-second intervals. NERC EDS British Oceanographic Data Centre NOC. doi:10.5285/4f68d5c7-45eb-f999-e063-7086abc036faTerms: The GEBCO Grid is placed in the public domain and may be used free of charge (www.gebco.net/data-products/gridded-bathymetry/terms-of-use).Changes: resampled (every fifth 15 arc-second cell, area-averaged, for the whole world; 30 arc-second averages over the seven regions), masked to the sea by data/world.json’s coast, darkened with depth and hillshaded by this app’s build into data/shade.webp and data/shade/. Not an official GEBCO product, and not endorsed by GEBCO, the IHO or the IOC. The GEBCO Grid should NOT be used for navigation or for any other purpose involving safety at sea.
Relief on land (Terrain shading)Natural Earth I with shaded relief, hypsometric tints and water, 1:50m, as luminanceLicense: public domain (Natural Earth), www.naturalearthdata.com/Changes: resampled to 4 096 × 2 048, grayed and masked to the land of data/world.json in data/shade/land.webp.
Type: Ysabeau Office by Christian Thalmann (Catharsis Fonts), SIL Open Font License 1.1; a subset is in fonts/ with its license.
A yearly build writes data/snapshot.json from Our World in Data’s energy dataset; data/world.json comes from Natural Earth, data/shade.webp and data/shade/ from GEBCO and Natural Earth by a build run by hand, and data/fields.json from a tracker release dropped in by hand. A scheduled refresh replaces data/snapshot.json. The map re-reads the three files every time it is opened and whenever new data lands while it is open; the app itself never goes online.