The authors of this commentary are Duncan Millard, IEA Chief Statistician and Roberta Quadrelli, Head of Energy Balances, Prices, Emissions and Efficiency.
Energy data are generally collected independently across different commodities, such as oil, natural gas or coal. As such, commodity balances provide the simplest way to present the data for one fuel together, expressed in physical units. This could be joules or cubic meters for natural gas or tonnes for coal, for example. This is the method used in the IEA’s fuel information books on oil, coal, natural gas, renewables and electricity, and also in the comprehensive World Energy Statistics – which combines information for all fuels together.
