The Unassuming Economist

From American Enterprise Institute:

“A big thanks to my former AEI colleague Olivier Ballou for helping me find the UK-based website Flourish, which allowed me create the “bar chart race” visualization above showing annual oil production (barrels per day) in the top ten oil-producing states (including federal offshore production) from 1981 to 2018. Perhaps the most interesting trend is to watch the rise of oil production in North Dakota. The state ranked No. 10 until about 2005, when revolutionary drilling and extraction technologies tapped into previously inaccessible shale oil deposits in the Bakken Formation in western North Dakota, and the state then rose to the No. 2 oil-producing US state by 2015 behind only Texas (and offshore production). Also notice the significant declines in conventional oil production in Alaska (from more than 2 million barrels per day in 1988 to below 500,000 bpd by 2014) and California (from more than 1 million bpd in the early 1980s to below 500,000 bpd in 2017).

The Flourish website is pretty user-friendly and I’ll try to produce more “bar chart race” visualizations in the future. If you have any ideas, please leave them in the comment section.”