How we source, attribute, and correct.

shortage.life publishes citable primary intelligence on global strategic reserves, energy, food, fertilizer and critical-mineral supply chains. The site aggregates, normalises and annotates data from institutional primary sources (EIA, OPEC MOMR, GIE AGSI+, JODI, USDA WASDE, FAO, Energy-Charts, GDELT, USGS, NOAA, Yahoo Finance) and publishes editorial briefings that explain what the numbers mean. Every number on every page traces back to a named primary source.

Factual. Every numerical claim is sourced. We cite the institution, the series identifier where applicable (e.g. EIA WCSSTUS1 for the US SPR weekly stocks), and the observation date.

Sober. No panic words, no "amid", no "experts warn", no "fears mount". We describe the operational layer — what the cushion is, how it draws down, what the timeline looks like — not the headline reflex.

Reconstructable. Methodology is published openly at /methodology; weights and inputs are versioned (currently v3.2). Anyone can reproduce the composite stress index from the same primary inputs.

Open. All data is published under CC-BY-4.0. The full corpus is downloadable as JSON (/api/v1), MCP (mcp.shortage.life/mcp), and RSS (/rss.xml).

We rank sources in this order:

1. Institutional primary — EIA, IEA, OPEC Secretariat, FAO, USDA OCE, GIE AGSI+, JODI, Eurostat. These get cited directly.
2. Exchange settlement & quoted prices — Yahoo Finance (NYM/CBOT/ICE continuous-future references), Shanghai Metals Market. Used when an institutional equivalent does not publish at the cadence we need.
3. Aggregators & news streams — GDELT 2.0 Doc API, USGS earthquake feed, NOAA severe weather. Used for event surfacing, never as the sole numerical authority for a published claim.
4. Editorial framing references— Bruegel, OWID, Argus, S&P Global Commodity Insights. Linked when their analysis adds context; never copy-pasted.

Several bylines on the site are editorial pseudonyms grouping output by beat — for example N. Vermeulen for oil markets, K. Lindqvist for EU gas and power. This is a long-running journalistic convention, also used by The Economist, FT Lex, and trade-press outlets like Argus Media and Reuters Breakingviews. The full list of pseudonyms — and the operator byline M. Cryptaguard — is on /authors, each clearly labelled. Editorial responsibility for every piece sits with CryptaGuard BV (Brussels), the publishing entity.

A subset of briefings carries the byline shortage.life agent. These are produced by an auto-publishing pipeline (Convex workflow + Groq Llama 3.3 70B) that detects anomalies in the live measurement stream — Brent ±3% breakouts, AGSI+ countries below 12% storage fill, FAO FFPI new highs, JODI production swings ≥10% month-on-month — and publishes data briefings within 60 seconds. Every agent-published briefing:

• passes a minimum-length, source-citation and dedup gate before publication;
• references only numbers present in the live measurements feed — the prompt explicitly forbids invented values;
• is auditable end-to-end via npx convex logs and the agent-published list at /admin/drafts;
• carries the same editorial responsibility as a human-bylined piece — the operator reviews the agent's output volume, prompt drift and accuracy on a rolling basis and adjusts thresholds or disables individual detectors as needed.

shortage.life is a wholly-owned publication of CryptaGuard BV, a company registered in Brussels, Belgium. Related projects under the same legal entity: Resiplan (business-continuity SaaS) and regulation-dora.eu (EU financial-services compliance reference). shortage.life takes no advertising, no sponsored content, and no paid placements. Briefings link to Resiplan only when the editorial subject matter — operational continuity — is the relevant call-to-action. We accept no equity, payment or trade access from any data source, operator, exchange or government entity covered on the site.

We correct errors quickly and visibly. Every correction is logged at /corrections. Report an error by emailing editorial@shortage.life. Substantive corrections are flagged inline on the briefing with a dated note; minor typographical or formatting fixes are silent but always logged.

All content on shortage.life is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. You may quote, republish, translate and adapt with attribution to shortage.life and a link back to the source page. The aggregated dataset is also free to download via the public API (/api/v1) under the same terms.