IEA Natural Gas Information

Natural Gas Information is the International Energy Agency's definitive annual compilation of natural gas statistics — the reference other gas publications get checked against. One product carries the whole gas ledger in five named datasets: OECD and selected countries natural gas supply and consumption; OECD imports by origin; OECD exports by destination; world natural gas statistics; and world imports by origin. The OECD files hold complete supply and demand balances with trade broken down by origin and destination for 38 member countries, 14 European non-OECD countries and 7 regional aggregates. The World files extend production, total imports and exports, gross inland consumption and import origins to roughly 150 countries across 23 to 25 regional aggregates, and trade runs to 166 origin-and-destination partners for both pipeline gas and LNG.

Series reach from 1960 to 2025, reported in million cubic metres and terajoules side by side. In Datadory's catalog of 1,744 datasets across 159 viable industries, this record scores 7/10 for quality and anchors the sixteen-record gas utilities set — the long-run, whole-world counterweight to the higher-frequency national feeds around it.

Get a sample of this dataset

Three row families carry everything the product publishes — an OECD balance row, a bilateral trade row and a world statistics row. Their anatomy, with quantities left as placeholders:

FAMILY: OECD supply-and-consumption balance row
country      : Germany
flow         : production | imports | exports
               | gross_inland_consumption | stock_change
               | final_consumption_<by_sector>
year         : <1960-2025>
value_mcm    : <million cubic metres>
value_tj     : <terajoules, gross calorific basis>

FAMILY: bilateral trade row
reporting    : Germany
partner      : Russia
direction    : import_by_origin | export_by_destination
medium       : pipeline | lng
year         : <one reporting year>
quantity_mcm : <annual volume>

FAMILY: world statistics row
country      : <any of ~150 countries>
flow         : production | total_imports | total_exports
               | gross_inland_consumption | imports_by_origin
year         : <one reporting year>
value_mcm    : <annual figure>

The placeholders are deliberate: the published documentation describes row shapes and the flow vocabulary, and Datadory does not print numbers it cannot stand behind. Two structural facts are already visible from the shapes alone. Every family keys on the same country dimension, so a balance row joins to a trade row without entity resolution in between. And every quantity arrives in volumetric and energy terms at once, so cross-country comparisons survive differing calorific conventions. Request a sample naming your countries and flows, and the same three shapes come back filled.

Six fields carry every row in the product, mapped below from the published flow vocabulary:

• Country — the reporting economy or a regional aggregate such as OECD, IEA or a regional total.
• Flow — the balance item: production, imports, exports, gross inland consumption, stock change, or consumption broken down by sector.
• Origin/Destination — the trade partner behind a pipeline or LNG flow, drawn from 166 countries in the trade files.
• Time — the calendar year, running 1960 to 2025 depending on when the country's series start.
• Value (mcm) — the quantity in million cubic metres.
• Value (TJ) — the same quantity in terajoules on a gross calorific basis.

That six-field spine is what makes the product modelable without preprocessing: one country dimension, one flow vocabulary, one time axis, dual units. Sector-level consumption splits, fuller per-partner export detail and derived views — import dependence, supplier concentration, seasonal residuals — sit under additional fields on request: named at sampling, computed on delivery, rather than guessed here.

Geography - two concentric circles. The inner ring covers 38 OECD countries plus 14 European non-OECD countries with full balance and origin-destination detail, wrapped in 7 regional aggregates. The outer ring reaches about 150 world countries with production, total trade, gross inland consumption and import origins, organized into 23 to 25 regional aggregates.

Temporal - 1960 through 2025, annually. Few gas series anywhere run continuously across pre-liberalization Europe, the oil shocks, the post-Soviet restructuring and the LNG era under one methodology, which is what makes decade-scale comparisons possible without rebasing work. The current edition carries provisional figures for the newest reporting year.

Granularity - annual observations at country level, with the trade layer cut finer still: bilateral cells pairing each reporter with each partner across pipeline and LNG mediums. National aggregates roll up cleanly into the regional and OECD totals for top-down framing.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Name the countries, flows and years you want when you request the sample — the full 150-country ledger, or a slice cut to your portfolio's import footprint. The sample ships first either way; the ongoing feed lands on whatever cadence your models run at, already shaped into the six-field spine above.

Sixty-five years of one-methodology gas balances earn their keep in four jobs:

• Energy market analysts — the citable base layer for gas market studies. Production against gross inland consumption against bilateral trade is the chapter-one table; the 1960-onward span is the trend exhibit behind it.
• Investors and quant researchers — supply security made measurable. Import origins per country turn "dependence" into a concentration ratio you can rank, stress and track, and the LNG-versus-pipeline split shows where cargoes replaced pipes.
• Policy, academic and NGO researchers — the reference that survives peer review. When a paper needs five decades of consumption by sector across the OECD, this is the source reviewers stop arguing about.
• Journalists and fact-checkers — the fastest way to test a claim about who sells gas to whom. Both sides of every bilateral flow sit in one ledger, so an exporter's story gets checked against the importer's books.

Where the question is real-time storage or weekly flows, pair it with the EIA Natural Gas Data Portal or the ENTSOG Transparency Platform; where it is infrastructure build-out, the Global Gas Infrastructure Tracker covers the asset layer this statistical ledger stays agnostic about.

Market Researchers & Consultants get scope, geography and years in one place — their three qualifying questions answer straight from the coverage. Investors & Quant Researchers get a sample period long enough to matter: testing whether an import-dependence signal led prices needs decades, not quarters, and 1960-to-2025 delivers them. Data Scientists get a six-field spine that loads without an entity-resolution project and joins cleanly to higher-frequency national feeds. Journalists, Academics & Students get the citation-grade original rather than someone's chart of it. Start from the gas utilities data hub, read the gas utilities data guide for the lay of the catalog, and see how this record compares against the EIA historical prices dataset for where a global balance ledger beats a national price archive.

Provenance note — published by the International Energy Agency, whose statistical office has compiled member-country energy balances since the agency's founding mission of energy security. Natural Gas Information is the gas volume of that program, organized as the five named datasets listed above.

Methodology note — gross inland consumption is the balancing total: production plus imports minus exports, adjusted for stock change and marine bunkers, before sector-level final consumption is carved out underneath. Reconcile sector rows upward to it before comparing countries, and the identity holds. Terajoule values sit on a gross calorific basis, so treat them as the energy-consistent term when volumes and heat diverge.

Completeness note — Datadory scores this record 7/10. The six-field dictionary above maps to the published flow vocabulary; column-level layout inside each named file, and any depth beyond the described coverage, are confirmed at sampling rather than asserted here.

Where to go next — for current-vintage national detail, the Eurostat Natural Gas Supply Statistics record covers European balances monthly and the EIA Natural Gas Monthly Report covers the United States; the LNG trade statistics glossary entry explains the trade medium behind the 166-partner matrix, and the ranked rundown of best gas utilities datasets places this record among its neighbors.