Energy and infrastructure

The energy and infrastructure layer carries the persistent objects, not the moving ones: refineries, pipeline corridors, LNG terminals, power stations of every fuel mix, nuclear plants under IAEA safeguards, and the seaports through which strategic cargo moves. Each renders on the globe at its surveyed coordinate with a type-specific glyph. Click and you get a card with operator, capacity, and the nearest signals or fire detections that have intersected the site.

The catalogue is built from OpenStreetMap, refined against a curated overrides file for sites where OSM is incomplete or wrong, and cross-referenced with Wikidata for operator names and identity linkage. The cross-reference produced an uplift of roughly 24,000 power stations, refineries, nuclear plants, and LNG terminals carrying populated operator names where OSM alone left the field blank. The Suriname Staatsolie refinery in Tout Lui Faut, for example, now displays its name and operator instead of reading as Unnamed Refinery.

Pipelines render as line geometry following the curated routing where available, and the OSM-sourced routing where not. The Saudi Master Gas System trunkline, the Trans-Anatolian gas line, Druzhba, Nord Stream 1 and 2 with their actual subsea routing, and the major Latin American oil corridors all appear with named labels. Pipeline incidents (explosions, pressure drops, sanctions-driven shutdowns) flow through the patterns rail when public reporting confirms them.

Industrial flares get their own treatment. Refineries, gas processing plants, and LNG terminals constantly burn off hydrocarbon byproduct from flare stacks; FIRMS thermal anomalies detect those without distinguishing them from real fires. SENTINEL classifies persistent flare locations from a 90-day rolling window and routes confirmed routine burnoff to a dedicated industrial-byproduct category, so the patterns rail surfaces only genuinely novel fires. Anomaly detection still escapes that filter when intensity spikes far above baseline.

The strategic-port layer surfaces global trade chokepoints in their own card style. Each port carries an estimated daily TEU throughput where published, daily transit counts when applicable (Suez, Panama), and a status indicator linked to the chokepoint scoring. Ports near active conflict zones get an additional disruption indicator pulled from the patterns engine and the active-conflict scoring.

On country dossier pages, the energy and infrastructure presence is summarised in the snapshot paragraph and dropped into the dossier as count by category. The live globe renders the actual geometry; this page exists to explain what each layer means and what to do when one of them lights up.