Documentation
Sources, variables, and preprocessing notes for the data powering the Energy Dashboard. All figures derive from publicly available International Energy Agency (IEA) publications.
01 — Overview
This page documents every dataset used in the Energy Dashboard. The central research question is whether rising EV adoption in non-oil-producing countries leads to measurable reductions in oil imports, and what the potential fiscal dividend of those savings might be.
All underlying data are sourced from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and are freely
available under the IEA's terms of use. The datasets were merged on a shared
country × year
key and filtered to exclude major oil-exporting nations (see Processing Notes).
Work in progress. Dataset details marked "to be confirmed" will be updated once the team finalises variable selection and cleaning scripts. Placeholder values are indicated in italics.
02 — Sources
Two IEA datasets form the backbone of this project. Each is described below.
Oil Import / Export Dataset
International Energy Agency (IEA)
Records crude oil and petroleum product import and export volumes by country. Used to derive net import position and to identify countries whose oil supply is predominantly import-dependent (i.e. non-major-exporters).
EV Sales & Market Growth Dataset
International Energy Agency (IEA)
Captures annual battery electric vehicle (BEV) and plug-in hybrid (PHEV) sales figures alongside each market's overall new-vehicle sales, enabling calculation of EV market share and year-over-year growth rates.
03 — Variables
The table below lists the primary variables present in the merged analytical dataset after preprocessing. Derived columns are calculated from the two source datasets.
| Variable | Description | Unit | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| country | ISO country name / region identifier | — | Oil EV |
| year | Calendar year of observation | YYYY | Oil EV |
| ev_sales | Total BEV + PHEV new vehicle sales in a given country and year | Vehicles (units) | EV |
| ev_share | EV sales as a percentage of total new passenger car registrations | % (0–100) | EV |
| ev_growth_rate | Year-over-year percentage change in EV sales volume | % change | Derived |
| oil_import | Total crude oil and petroleum product imports | kb/d | Oil |
| oil_export | Total crude oil and petroleum product exports | kb/d | Oil |
| net_oil_import | Oil imports minus oil exports; positive = net importer | kb/d | Derived |
| oil_import_delta | Year-over-year change in oil import volume | kb/d (Δ) | Derived |
| estimated_savings | Estimated financial value of oil import reduction attributed to EV adoption, at a reference oil price. (methodology to be confirmed) | USD billions | Derived |
04 — Processing
The following steps were applied to prepare the raw IEA data for analysis and visualisation. All scripts are version-controlled in the project repository.
snake_case
and country names were mapped to ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes to ensure a consistent
join key across datasets.
oil_import,
ev_sales,
or year
were dropped. Outlier values (e.g., reporting artefacts with zero imports for large economies)
were flagged and excluded from trend calculations.
net_oil_import
over 2015–2023 was negative (i.e. exports exceeded imports). These countries —
such as Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Norway — were excluded from the core analysis
to isolate the relationship between EV adoption and import dependency.
(country_iso3, year).
An inner join was used, retaining only country–year observations present in both datasets.
This reduced coverage to approximately 30 countries from 2013 onward.
net_oil_import,
oil_import_delta,
ev_growth_rate,
and estimated_savings
— were computed from the merged dataset. Savings estimates use a reference Brent
crude price of USD 80/barrel (2023 average) applied to the barrels-per-day reduction
attributable to the EV fleet.
oil_import
values were also normalised by population (kb/d per million inhabitants) using
World Bank population data for the corresponding year.
05 — Downloads
Processed datasets and source code will be made available below once the project is finalised. Raw source data must be obtained directly from the IEA under their terms of use.