Opening up the data or webscrape the 2015 free allocation of emission units from MfE

Let's look at the latest data on the very generous free give-aways of emissions units to emitters made by the Ministry for the Environment
(N.B. Update on 10 December 2016. The allocation decisions have moved to the web page of the Environmental Protection Authority. And the "importHTML" function in Google sheets does not work on the EPA pages.)

The Ministry for the Environment has up dated its webpage 2015 Industrial Allocation Decisions to show the final 2015 free allocation of emission units to emitters under the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme.

I looked at the 2010 to 2014 data in my post Opening up the data on emissions units in the NZ emissions trading scheme. So in this post I am will repeat my steps in web-scraping the freebie emissions unit data into a sensible open format.

The url of the webpage is http://www.mfe.govt.nz/climate-change/reducing-greenhouse-gas-emissions/new-zealand-emissions-trading-scheme/participatin-4

Go to Google and open a new Google sheet.

Enter this text in cell A1 of the Google sheet.

=importHTML("http://www.mfe.govt.nz/climate-change/reducing-greenhouse-gas-emissions/new-zealand-emissions-trading-scheme/participatin-4","table",1)

That worked perfectly! We have a Google sheet of the 2015 free unit allocation to NZ emissions trading scheme emitters.

I have saved it as NZETS-2015-final-allocations-for-eligible-activities.

However, the first column includes both industry names and types of industries classified by the type of emissions the industry produces. And lots of asterisks. Any sensible format would have these attributes as separate columns so that each company/emitter would have a row each.

So I used a programme called Open Refine to data-wrangle the data into that format and to save it as a comma-separated values file which is this Google sheet NZETS-2015-final-allocations-for-eligible-activities. Its a bit fiddly using Open Refine, so I won't describe how I did it.

This is the updated free emission unit allocation data from 2010 to 2015.

As usual, the big emitters get the most emission units! Of 4.417 million units allocated to industries, 90% went to 11 large companies. New Zealand Steel Development Limited, of arbitrage profits fame, gets 1,067,501 free units. New Zealand Aluminium Smelters Limited gets 772,706 free units.

I did a bit of data visualising and created this pie-chart in R programming language.

The R script for that is

Did I not get the End the Rainbow memo? So I picked a better colour scale from Colour Brewer.

The R script for this non-rainbow pie chart is: