Hydrionis Facility Water Relationships Dataset

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.

What this dataset cannot tell you

Read before relying on these figures

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.

Coverage

Subjects	United States thermoelectric generating stations reporting cooling water — 0 held
Period	–
Units	not held
Update cadence	Irregularly, when the publisher releases
Identifier	`facility-water-relationships` v1.0.0

Fields

Data dictionary →

Every metric this dataset carries, with the unit it is stored in and the geography level it is reported at. Full definitions are in the data dictionary.

Identifier	Field	Unit	Reported at
`facility-water-withdrawal`	Facility water withdrawal Volume of water a single facility took from its source in a reporting period, before any return.	Mm³	country
`facility-water-consumption`	Facility water consumption Volume of water a single facility withdrew and did not return to the water environment.	Mm³	country

Rights and access

Licence position

Restricted — see below. Derivative use false; redistribution false; commercial reuse false.

No registered source could be resolved for this value, so no rights can be established. This is a data defect, not a licence position.

Permitted uses

Available to: . These follow from the rights of the contributing publishers, not from a Hydrionis pricing decision — no access tier can widen what a publisher withheld.

Contributing sources

Attribution and citation

Cite and reuse →

Two different obligations, deliberately kept apart. One is a condition of somebody else's licence; the other is a request Hydrionis has no standing to enforce.

Suggested citation for Hydrionis

Hydrionis (2026), Hydrionis Facility Water Relationships Dataset, version 1.0.0, accessed 2026-10-05, hydrionis.com/data/datasets/facility-water-relationships/

Cite Hydrionis where you rely on values Hydrionis computed, on the method that produced them, or on the compilation itself. The underlying measurements remain the publishers’ and their attribution requirements apply to you directly.

Recommended, not required. Hydrionis does not claim rights over unmodified public data it relayed, and doing arithmetic on somebody else’s measurements does not make them Hydrionis’s. Cite the version and the access date: Hydrionis Facility Water Relationships Dataset changes as publishers release and as methods are revised, and a citation without both cannot be checked later. Full guidance is on cite and reuse.

Changelog

Version 1.0.0 — 2026-08-27

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.

Use this data

Machine-readable JSON /api/v1/datasets/facility-water-relationships.json
How to cite this, and who you must credit
How these figures were produced
Request this at a different scale, format or geography

No bulk download is offered here, which is a licence position rather than a product one: at least one contributing publisher does not permit redistribution. The values can be read on the page, cited, and pointed to at source.

The licence position in full: No source is recorded for this value, so no use of it can be authorised.

Every bulk extract ships with a companion metadata file carrying this dataset’s version, its sources, their licences, the attribution you are required to give and the suggested citation — so the terms travel with the file rather than staying on this page.

About this data

The fields a professional user needs to judge whether this is fit for a particular purpose. Deliberately not a score.

About this data

Everything below is a property of the data rather than a rating of it. There is deliberately no single confidence score: how much a gap matters depends on what you are about to do with the series, and only you know that.

Source
How the values came to exist	Derived Computed by Hydrionis
Known gaps	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.
Continuity	Version 1.0.0, released 2026-08-27. 1 recorded version; breaking changes and corrections are listed in the changelog above.
Inputs last read	not recorded · when the records this was computed from were last read from their publishers · publisher updates irregularly, when the publisher releases
Redistribution	Not permitted by the upstream licences
Commercial reuse	Not permitted by the upstream licences. No Hydrionis access tier can widen this.
Methodology	How this was produced