Data sources & licences
Every figure in the ledger traces to a cited, license-clean open dataset. Nothing is scraped from proprietary services; nothing is fabricated. Live per-night VIIRS Nightfire ingest is a stub pending an EOG account.
Primary datasets
| Dataset | Contents | Licence | Access |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOAA VIIRS Nightfire (VNF) | Nighttime flare heat signatures — location, temperature, radiance, timing. | Open (NASA/NOAA); EOG Colorado School of Mines. | eogdata.mines.edu / products/vnf |
| World Bank Global Gas Flaring Tracker, June 2026 | Emissions ratios: 167 bcm (2025) ≈ 429 MtCO₂e incl. 50 MtCO₂e unburned methane (1.8 Mt CH₄). | Free with attribution. | worldbank.org gas flaring data page |
| World Bank GFMR — Individual Flare Sites | Per-site, per-year flare volumes (2012–2025), operator & field attribution. Vintage: the June 2026 release (Global Gas Flaring Tracker, 23 June 2026), on the new three-satellite methodology (Suomi NPP, NOAA-20, NOAA-21; revised calibration; series restated back to 2012). | Free with attribution. | worldbank.org gas flaring data page |
| Flare Gas (Prevention of Waste and Pollution) Regulations, 2018 S.I. No. 9 of 2018 · Official Gazette No. 88, Vol. 105, 9 July 2018 |
Penalty basis, Reg. 13: US$2.00 per 1,000 scf (28.317 m³) where ≥10,000 bbl oil/day is produced; US$0.50 where less. Both tiers are shown because we do not hold production rates. | Public government gazette. | ngfcp.nuprc.gov.ng (scanned PDF) |
| GRID3 NGA Population v3.0 KFL-M 1.3 | Bayesian-modelled gridded population, 100 m cells, scaled to UN-WPP 2025 (national total 237.5 m). Summed within 5 / 10 / 25 / 50 km of every site. The raster is processed offline; only the 476-row result ships. | CC BY 4.0 | wopr.worldpop.org/download/611 |
| GRID3 NGA Settlement Points (2021) | Named settlement points (eHealth Africa, Proxy Logics, ORNL): nearest settlement and largest centre within 25 km. | CC BY 4.0 | GRID3 ArcGIS feature service |
| Electricity access — World Bank WDI (Tracking SDG7) and Nigeria DHS 2023-24 | National access 62.5% (urban 85.5%, rural 23.5%; WDI 2024). State population-with-electricity from NDHS 2024; the state rural proxy is derived (state rate × national rural/total ratio) because no rural-by-state figure is published. | CC BY 4.0 (WDI); DHS Program terms, cite NPC/ICF | api.worldbank.org · api.dhsprogram.com |
| NASA FIRMS — VIIRS 375 m active fire NRT | Hot-pixel detections (bright_ti4 K, FRP MW) from Suomi NPP, NOAA-20 and NOAA-21, pulled daily for the live thermal check and the last-24h layer. | NASA open data (acknowledgement requested) | firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov (regional CSV, no key) |
| ACLED — Nigeria conflict events | Monthly political-violence, civilian-targeting and demonstration events (and fatalities) by LGA, via HDX. Point events need a myACLED account and are not yet ingested. | ACLED Terms of Use & Attribution Policy (non-commercial monitoring) | data.humdata.org/dataset/nigeria-acled-conflict-data |
Map overlay layers
| Layer | Source | Licence | File |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nigeria states (37) | geoBoundaries gbOpen NGA ADM1 (GRID3) | CC BY 4.0 | nga-states.geojson |
| Local Government Areas (774) | geoBoundaries gbOpen NGA ADM2 (GRID3) | CC BY 4.0 | nga-lgas.geojson |
| Oil & gas pipelines (154) | USGS Africa oil & gas infrastructure; attributes from Cross-border Information (London) Ltd. / African Energy Live Data | Public domain (USGS) | nga-pipelines.geojson |
| Live thermal (last 24h) | NASA FIRMS / LANCE VIIRS 375 m NRT, Nigeria bbox, refreshed daily by a GitHub Action | NASA open data | /api/live |
| Security: ACLED events by LGA (LGAs within 50 km of a site) | ACLED via HDX, joined by P-code to OCHA COD-AB admin-2 boundaries | ACLED terms; COD-AB CC BY-IGO | security-lga.geojson |
Coordinates are rounded to 5 decimal places (~1 m) for the web; geometry is otherwise unchanged. State, LGA and nearest-pipeline context for each flare is computed in the browser (point-in-polygon and nearest line segment). The Niger Delta flag uses the same ADM1 layer: the union of the nine Niger Delta states, by point-in-polygon. Offshore sites beyond the state boundary are labelled separately (see methodology §8).
Source registry
Every source is checked by scripts/validate_sources.py. It records whether the source is reachable, its
version or vintage, a SHA-256 checksum of the fetched bytes and its licence, and writes
docs/DATA-SOURCES-REGISTRY.md. It exits non-zero if any source is unreachable, so a stale source shows up
instead of failing silently.
Seed data
The current snapshot is derived from the World Bank GFMR individual-flare-site
dataset (Nigeria subset), committed to this repository as
data/gfmr_nigeria_sites_seed.json (476 unique sites, 2012–2025).
The live digest (one row per site-year; volumes in million m³, with bcm and
MMscfd) downloads from /api/digest.csv;
a static snapshot built from the committed seed is at
kaliabe-flare-digest.csv.
Live ingestion
.github/workflows/live-thermal.yml) pulls the
NASA FIRMS VIIRS 375 m regional files every day, matches detections to ledger sites within 1 km, and commits a rolling
30-night summary that the API reads. The archive verdicts still come from GFMR annual volumes; the live check adds
“is it burning now?”. Raw per-night VIIRS Nightfire (VNF) files at eogdata.mines.edu need an EOG login and are not fetched.Security. ACLED point events need a myACLED account. Until that exists, the security block uses ACLED's public LGA-level monthly aggregates; per-site radius counts are marked pending.
Sources
- World Bank GFMR — Global Gas Flaring Data & Tracker: worldbank.org/en/programs/gasflaringreduction/global-flaring-data
- VIIRS Nightfire (NOAA EOG / Payne Institute): eogdata.mines.edu/products/vnf/
- Flare Gas (Prevention of Waste and Pollution) Regulations, 2018, S.I. No. 9 of 2018, Official Gazette No. 88 Vol. 105 (9 July 2018), as hosted by the NUPRC Nigerian Gas Flare Commercialisation Programme: ngfcp.nuprc.gov.ng (the 2022 in the URL is the upload date, not the instrument)
- World Bank, Global Gas Flaring Tracker, June 2026: thedocs.worldbank.org
- Schuit et al. 2023 (methane hot-spot detection method, CAMS): atmosphere.copernicus.eu / CAMS documentation
- GRID3 NGA Population v3.0 and Settlement Points (CC BY 4.0): grid3.org · WorldPop WOPR
- NASA FIRMS / LANCE: firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov — “We acknowledge the use of data and/or imagery from NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS), part of NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS).”
- ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data): acleddata.com, via HDX; boundaries OCHA COD-AB (HDX cod-ab-nga)
- World Bank WDI (EG.ELC.ACCS.*) and Nigeria DHS 2023-24 (NPC & ICF), via The DHS Program API
- World Bank, Gas Flaring Estimates: Methodology for determining flare gas volumes from satellite data: pubdocs.worldbank.org