Hydrionis Industrial Cooling Water Dataset

What this looks like

One real series from the dataset, and real rows from the head of its published extract. Neither is a mock-up: the rows below are the same rows, unchanged, that are in the file you would download.

Sample rows

12 of 14,968 rows Taken from the start of observations-sector-use-us-eia-cooling-water.csv. These are sample rows, not the dataset.

Sample rows from the Hydrionis Industrial Cooling Water Dataset extract
`metric_id`	`subject_id`	`subject_kind`	`value`	`censored`	`censor_operator`	`censor_threshold`	`censor_limit`	`censor_reported`	`unit`	`period_start`	`period_end`	`period_kind`	`basis`	`confidence`	`source_id`	`source_ref`	`qualifier`	`superseded`	`retrieved`
facility-water-consumption	us-eia-plant-10	geography	0	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2014-01-01	2014-12-31	year	aggregated	high	us-eia-cooling-water	EIA-923 plant 10	—	—	2026-10-01
facility-water-consumption	us-eia-plant-10	geography	0	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2015-01-01	2015-12-31	year	aggregated	high	us-eia-cooling-water	EIA-923 plant 10	—	—	2026-10-01
facility-water-consumption	us-eia-plant-10	geography	0	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2016-01-01	2016-12-31	year	aggregated	high	us-eia-cooling-water	EIA-923 plant 10	—	—	2026-10-01
facility-water-consumption	us-eia-plant-10	geography	0	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2017-01-01	2017-12-31	year	aggregated	high	us-eia-cooling-water	EIA-923 plant 10	—	—	2026-10-01
facility-water-consumption	us-eia-plant-10	geography	0	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2018-01-01	2018-12-31	year	aggregated	high	us-eia-cooling-water	EIA-923 plant 10	—	—	2026-10-01
facility-water-consumption	us-eia-plant-10	geography	0	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2019-01-01	2019-12-31	year	aggregated	high	us-eia-cooling-water	EIA-923 plant 10	—	—	2026-10-01
facility-water-consumption	us-eia-plant-10	geography	0	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2021-01-01	2021-12-31	year	aggregated	high	us-eia-cooling-water	EIA-923 plant 10	—	—	2026-10-01
facility-water-consumption	us-eia-plant-10	geography	0	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2022-01-01	2022-12-31	year	aggregated	high	us-eia-cooling-water	EIA-923 plant 10	—	—	2026-10-01
facility-water-consumption	us-eia-plant-10	geography	0	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2023-01-01	2023-12-31	year	aggregated	high	us-eia-cooling-water	EIA-923 plant 10	—	—	2026-10-01
facility-water-consumption	us-eia-plant-10	geography	0	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2024-01-01	2024-12-31	year	aggregated	high	us-eia-cooling-water	EIA-923 plant 10	—	—	2026-10-01
facility-water-consumption	us-eia-plant-1001	geography	6.662325	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2014-01-01	2014-12-31	year	aggregated	high	us-eia-cooling-water	EIA-923 plant 1001	—	—	2026-10-01
facility-water-consumption	us-eia-plant-1001	geography	7.969946	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2015-01-01	2015-12-31	year	aggregated	high	us-eia-cooling-water	EIA-923 plant 1001	—	—	2026-10-01

Download these rows as CSV — the same twelve, with the column header, for testing a loader before committing to the full file.

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.

What this dataset cannot tell you

Read before relying on these figures

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.

Coverage

Subjects	United States thermoelectric generating stations reporting cooling water — 838 held
Period	2014–2024
Units	Mm³
Update cadence	Annually
Identifier	`industrial-cooling-water` 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
`facility-water-reclaimed`	Facility reclaimed water use Volume a facility took from reclaimed or reused sources rather than from fresh surface water or groundwater.	Mm³	country

Rights and access

Licence position

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

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

United States Energy Information Administration — Thermoelectric cooling water — EIA-923 (US Government work — public domain)

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 Industrial Cooling Water Dataset, version 1.0.0, accessed 2026-10-05, hydrionis.com/data/datasets/industrial-cooling-water/

Cite Hydrionis where you rely on the compilation, the normalisation, the eligibility judgements or a chart. Where you use an unmodified published value, the publisher’s attribution is the one that is required; crediting Hydrionis as well is welcome and is not something Hydrionis can require of you.

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 Industrial Cooling Water 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.

None of the contributing licences requires attribution. Crediting the publishers is still good practice and they are listed above.

Changelog

Version 1.0.0 — 2026-08-26

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.

Use this data

Download sector-use observations from EIA (14,968 rows) (CSV)
Machine-readable JSON /api/v1/datasets/industrial-cooling-water.json
How to cite this, and who you must credit
How these figures were produced
Request this at a different scale, format or geography

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	United States Energy Information Administration — Thermoelectric cooling water — EIA-923 · US Government work — public domain
How the values came to exist	Mixed across the series — the basis is recorded on every individual value.
Period held	2014–2024
Known gaps	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.
Continuity	Version 1.0.0, released 2026-08-26. 1 recorded version; breaking changes and corrections are listed in the changelog above.
Last read from the publisher	2026-10-01 · publisher updates annually
Redistribution	Permitted by the upstream licences
Commercial reuse	Permitted by the upstream licences. No Hydrionis access tier can widen this.
Methodology	How this was produced