Hydrionis Facility Water Relationships Dataset

49,588

Observations

7,887

Series

5,158

Subjects

1840–2010

Period covered

Methodology

Built by scripts/build-facility-water.ts, a governed derivation run separately from ingestion and committed. 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 — 5,158 held
Period	1840–2010
Units	%, Mm³, km³/yr, m, mg/l, mg/l as N, mg/l as P, mm, m³/person/yr, m³/s, pH, °C
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

Open with attribution. Derivative use true; redistribution true; commercial reuse true.

Attribution required:

Data from Eurostat, used under European Commission reuse policy (Decision 2011/833/EU).
Source: Hub’Eau / Système d’information sur l’eau, under Licence Ouverte (Etalab).
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Data from World Bank, used under CC BY 4.0.

HadUK-Grid is available under the Open Government Licence via the CEDA archive, which requires free registration. Other Met Office products, including forecast and commercial services, are separately licensed and are not open.
Applies to material authored by US federal agencies. Third-party material carried within a federal product may be separately protected.

Permitted uses

Public display
Derived analysis
API delivery
Bulk download
Commercial use

Available to: Public, Developer, Research, Professional, Enterprise. 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

Eurostat — Water statistics (European Commission reuse policy (Decision 2011/833/EU))
Office français de la biodiversité / SCHAPI — Hydrométrie — French river flow and stage (Licence Ouverte / Open Licence v2.0 (Etalab))
Bureau de recherches géologiques et minières — Piézométrie — French groundwater levels (Licence Ouverte / Open Licence v2.0 (Etalab))
Environment Agency — Hydrology Data Explorer API (Open Government Licence v3.0)
Environment Agency — Water Quality Archive (WIMS) (Open Government Licence v3.0)
Met Office — HadUK-Grid gridded climate observations (Open Government Licence v3.0)
Scottish Environment Protection Agency — SEPA water environment data (Open Government Licence v3.0)
United States Geological Survey — National Water Information System (US Government work — public domain)
World Bank — World Development Indicators (CC BY 4.0)

Suggested citation

Hydrionis (2026), Hydrionis Facility Water Relationships Dataset, version 1.0.0. Retrieved from https://hydrionis.com/data/datasets/facility-water-relationships/

Cite the version. Hydrionis datasets change as publishers release and as methods are revised, and a citation without a version cannot be checked later.

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.

Getting the data

sector-use observations from World Bank (18,241 rows) (CSV)

Machine-readable metadata for this dataset is at /api/v1/datasets/facility-water-relationships.json. For bulk extracts, higher-volume access or commercial licensing, see data enquiries.