{"id":"facility-water-relationships","slug":"facility-water-relationships","name":"Hydrionis Facility Water Relationships Dataset","description":"Which water each industrial facility takes from, returns to, and stands within — held as three separate relationships rather than one. Covers the United States thermoelectric generating stations Hydrionis holds cooling water for, with the method, tier, evidence source and derivation date on every relationship.","methodology":"A governed derivation, worked out once and stored rather than recalculated when a page is shown. Two relationships are Tier A, taken from the operator’s own statement on the EIA-923 cooling water return: the water body it draws from, and the water body it discharges to. The third is Tier C, a point-in-polygon containment of the plant’s EIA-860 coordinates within the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset’s eight-digit subbasins, with the coordinate system declared to the service rather than inferred. The spatial method may only ever produce a basin-location relationship: proximity is not use, and a plant supplied by pipeline from another catchment stands in one basin and draws from another. Where the plant schedule and the water return disagree about the source — at 157 of the held facilities — the water return is taken, because it is the form that reports the withdrawal, and both are retained.","domains":["sector-use","withdrawal","energy-water"],"metricIds":["facility-water-withdrawal","facility-water-consumption"],"subjectScope":"United States thermoelectric generating stations reporting cooling water","cadence":"irregular","version":"1.0.0","released":"2026-08-27","derived":true,"changelog":[{"version":"1.0.0","date":"2026-08-27","summary":"First release. A facility’s relationship to water is modelled as three distinct relationships rather than one water body.","additions":["Abstraction source and discharge receiving water for the facilities whose operators state them.","Basin location for every facility carrying coordinates, from an authoritative spatial containment.","Operator, ownership shares, county and position from the EIA-860 generator report."]}],"limitations":["The three relationships are not interchangeable and must never be substituted for one another. At a quarter of the facilities held, the water taken from and the water returned to are different; at Palo Verde all three answers differ and none is a river.","A basin location says where a facility stands and nothing about what it uses. It is derived from coordinates, not from any statement about water.","This graph is deliberately not joined to the gauge water bodies. No publisher issues an identifier linking them, and of the water bodies American facilities name, the only ones matching a gauge’s water body match a subbasin named after a river rather than the river itself.","A water source named by an operator is frequently not a water body: wells, municipal supply, treated effluent and cooling ponds all appear. They are recorded verbatim rather than normalised into a river.","Coverage is thermoelectric generation in the United States. No other sector or country has a comparable facility-level return that Hydrionis has found with compatible rights."],"observationCount":0,"seriesCount":0,"subjectCount":0,"sourceIds":[],"units":[],"redistributable":false,"commerciallyReusable":false,"rightsNote":"No source is recorded for this value, so no use of it can be authorised.","citation":"Hydrionis (2026), Hydrionis Facility Water Relationships Dataset, version 1.0.0. Retrieved from https://hydrionis.com/data/datasets/facility-water-relationships/","downloads":[],"apiPath":"/api/v1/datasets/facility-water-relationships.json","fields":[{"id":"facility-water-withdrawal","name":"Facility water withdrawal","definition":"Volume of water a single facility took from its source in a reporting period, before any return.","unit":"Mm³","nativeGeography":["country"],"comparabilityNotes":"A facility figure, never a company total. Two plants with the same generation can differ a hundredfold in withdrawal purely by cooling design, so withdrawal ranks cooling technology at least as much as it ranks water use."},{"id":"facility-water-consumption","name":"Facility water consumption","definition":"Volume of water a single facility withdrew and did not return to the water environment.","unit":"Mm³","nativeGeography":["country"],"comparabilityNotes":"Consumption and withdrawal are not alternative measurements of one quantity and must never be substituted for one another. A facility ranked highest on withdrawal is frequently well down the consumption ranking, and the reverse."}]}