GRID · ENERGY PIPELINES
How Energy Moves
Electricity is only half the story. The other half flows through pipe: 16,054 major trunk pipelinescarrying natural gas, crude oil and refined fuels across continents and under seas, from OpenStreetMap. They’re coloured by what they carry, and these are the long-distance lines only — the cross-country and international corridors, not the local mains that run under your street.
What they carry
Pipelines fall into three families, and on the map each is a different colour. Natural gasis by far the most mapped — the lines feeding power stations, factories and homes. Crude oil runs from oilfields to refineries and ports. Refined products— petrol, diesel, jet fuel — carry the finished fuels onward from the refinery.
Where they’re mapped
One honest caveat reads loudest here: about 94% of these corridors are in North America and Europe — the United States alone is roughly 50%. That is notwhere most of the world’s pipe actually lies: Russia, Central Asia, the Middle East and China run vast networks that are thinly mapped at this scale. What you’re seeing is where OpenStreetMap’s pipeline mapping is densest, not a ranking of real pipeline length. In well-mapped regions the data also includes shorter gathering and storage lines, not only the headline international trunks.
The longest mapped systems
The longest named pipelines in the dataset — a mix of US gas and crude trunks and Russia’s great export lines. Famous international corridors are in here too: the Druzhba (“Friendship”) crude line, the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan oil pipeline, the Trans Adriatic gas line, Nord Stream. Of 16,054 corridors, 6,554 carry a name.
About this data
Every line here is a real feature from OpenStreetMap tagged man_made=pipeline with usage=transmission (via the Overpass API, ODbL). We show only the long-distance trunk network— never the local distribution mains that deliver gas to streets and buildings — and we show only what each line carries, nothing operational: no operator, no pressure, no equipment. It’s public-infrastructure cartography, the same posture as the high-voltage transmission backbone. Coverage follows OpenStreetMap’s mapping, which is heavily weighted to North America and Europe, so treat this as the mapped network, not a complete or proportional global picture. Snapshot taken 2026-06-24.