Units
Thanks cliffman. You are right - it would have been better if I'd found or made a graph of production rates in mbpd instead, for consistency. But that might have been a bigger task than I wanted to get into, because I wanted to show the long term perspective (going back to 1860) to make that point, and that graph was handy.
But I feel your pain about units. I've been complaining about it since 2005 in my public work, and before that too. I want all the hours of my life back that I've spent laboriously converting one data set in millions of tonnes per year to barrels per day, and so on, especially for the pieces where I had to merge multiple data sets that were all in different units. It's really a pain. I have cajoled and pleaded with other energy analysts to switch to a common unit, like quads or EJs, but I haven't gotten too far with it, and I don't see any relief so long as EIA, IEA, BP, and other major data sources continue to insist on their preferred units. That said, I have noticed a gradual drift toward EJs in the last few years, so maybe there's hope for guys like us after all. (And that's just the data; how about mbpd vs. MBD vs. mb/d vs. MMB/D, etc.? Not to mention the ridiculous "MMBtu"...awful.)
