{"id":"industrial-cooling-water","slug":"industrial-cooling-water","name":"Hydrionis Industrial Cooling Water Dataset","description":"Facility-level water withdrawal and consumption for United States thermoelectric generation, from the mandatory EIA-923 return: around 716 generating stations, with the cooling system, the water type, the source type and the name of the water body each draws from. Withdrawal and consumption are held as separate quantities throughout.","methodology":"Collected from the annual EIA cooling water workbooks, which are a work of the United States government and therefore public domain. EIA publishes monthly returns per plant and per cooling system; Hydrionis stores an annual facility figure, summed across the plant’s own cooling systems and its own twelve monthly returns, and published only for years in which all twelve months were reported. Volumes are converted from million US gallons at 3,785.411784 cubic metres per million gallons. A plant-year reporting more water consumed than withdrawn is refused entirely rather than corrected: that cannot happen, one of the two figures is wrong, nothing says which, and amending an operator’s statutory return is not Hydrionis’s to do. Company-wide totals are never assembled from these figures.","domains":["sector-use","withdrawal","energy-water"],"metricIds":["facility-water-withdrawal","facility-water-consumption","facility-water-reclaimed"],"subjectScope":"United States thermoelectric generating stations reporting cooling water","cadence":"annual","version":"1.0.0","released":"2026-08-26","changelog":[{"version":"1.0.0","date":"2026-08-26","summary":"First release. The first facility-level water layer on the platform.","additions":["Annual withdrawal and consumption for around 716 generating stations, 2019 onward.","Reclaimed water held separately from fresh withdrawal.","Cooling system, water type, source type and named water body recorded on every facility."]}],"limitations":["Withdrawal and consumption are different quantities and neither is a proxy for the other. Across the covered facilities about 2% of withdrawal is consumed, while the median facility consumes about two thirds of what it takes; the difference is cooling design, not measurement.","These are facility figures, never company totals. A utility operating fifteen plants appears fifteen times, and summing them would produce a number assembled on a different basis from anything the company reports.","Coverage is thermoelectric generation only, and only plants that reported. It is not the water use of the American power sector, and it is not industrial water use.","Years in which an operator reported fewer than twelve months are absent. A year assembled from part of itself is a different quantity with a year’s name on it.","Plant-years reporting more consumption than withdrawal are absent. Fifty-eight were refused across the covered years, one of them reporting twelve times more consumed than withdrawn.","The named water source is recorded on the facility and is not yet joined to the water-body registry. A power station is not a gauge, and putting one into a river’s gauge list would place a plant where a reader expects a measurement."],"observationCount":14968,"seriesCount":1716,"subjectCount":838,"from":2014,"to":2024,"sourceIds":["us-eia-cooling-water"],"units":["Mm³"],"redistributable":true,"commerciallyReusable":true,"citation":"Hydrionis (2026), Hydrionis Industrial Cooling Water Dataset, version 1.0.0. Retrieved from https://hydrionis.com/data/datasets/industrial-cooling-water/","downloads":[{"file":"/downloads/observations-sector-use-us-eia-cooling-water.csv","format":"CSV","label":"sector-use observations from EIA (14,968 rows)"}],"apiPath":"/api/v1/datasets/industrial-cooling-water.json","lastFetched":"2026-10-01","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."},{"id":"facility-water-reclaimed","name":"Facility reclaimed water use","definition":"Volume a facility took from reclaimed or reused sources rather than from fresh surface water or groundwater.","unit":"Mm³","nativeGeography":["country"],"comparabilityNotes":"A component of withdrawal identified by its source, not an additional volume. Adding it to withdrawal would double-count it."}]}