Using Power BI to tell stories about Oil

This blog post shows the potential of Power BI in creating insights when visualizing data dynamically. It is not only storytelling with data using static pre-made graphs, but something a lot more complex — interactive storytelling, which adds another dimension to a static image. As the user clicks and filters the graphical visuals change. Hence, one must account for the possible interactions, and explore all the main stories beforehand. This places more demand on the creator, but, if done right, multiplies the value, to tell not just a story, but a book of stories all on one screen.

Sources and why oil stats?

The dataset comes from the Statistical Review of World Energy produced by BP. It has a large number of fact columns and one dimension table. Fact columns are production and consumption statistics that in some cases reserves numbers of all key natural resources by year (since 1965), by country. The number of dimension tables is limited to one: countries and their characteristics.

In this example, I will show how it is possible to tell a story focusing on just one aspect of this dataset — oil stats. Three reasons for choosing oil first. First, most people are aware of oil market dynamics and know about OPEC, Saudi Arabia, Russia. Second, it is a sector of the economy that I spend a few years studying and working in, first during my Masters in Energy in Norway, then as Oil and Gas investment banking analyst in London. Hence, these numbers are quite familiar to me. Third, as a way to show my gratitude to this data source. Back in the day as an O&G sector analyst, I always felt grateful to BP for this report as it allowed us to get the quality data for industry overview slides, and maybe sometimes go home before 2 am.

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Main Graph

First — the main graphic of this report is the big Area chart (at the top center) with 3 lines in it. Two lines — consumption (light blue) and production (darker blue), are drawn on one axis. The third line — called Proficit (yellow area), which is the surplus of production vs consumption, is drawn on another axis.

1. Consumption and production are growing equally and almost without stops since the mid-1980s.
2. Proficit is starting to develop since mid-2010, after decades of equal consumption and demand. In this period, US production more than doubled, from 7 mln bbl in 2009 to 15 mln bbl in 2019.
3. Before that, from 1965–1984, there was a great proficit — close to 10% of consumption.
4. During this proficit period prices were quite low, but not until global consumption increased to 80 mln barrels per day when low proficit started to drive the price up.

There is also a tooltip, which allows the user by hovering over a point in the Main Graph to see additional information — which countries produced and consumed the most in that year. This tooltip, if hovered over 1984 and 1985 — shows that USSR is used in 1984, but replaced by Russia in 1985. If you keep hovering over the line as you through the years, you will see the drop in production coming from Russia that starts from 1994 to 2000. From 11 mln bbl per day to 6 mln bbl. A period is known as the “nineties” in Russia. Something that I can relate to — growing up in Russian region at the time.