Hydrionis Industrial Cooling Water Dataset

14,968

Observations

1,716

Series

838

Subjects

2014–2024

Period covered

Methodology

Ingested 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 A plant-year reporting more water consumed than withdrawn is refused entirely rather than corrected: that cannot happen, one of the two figures is wrong, nothing says which, and amending an operator’s statutory return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 Fifty-eight were refused across the covered years, one of them reporting twelve times more consumed than withdrawn.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)

Suggested citation

Hydrionis (2026), Hydrionis Industrial Cooling Water Dataset, version 1.0.0. Retrieved from https://hydrionis.com/data/datasets/industrial-cooling-water/

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 — 2026-08-26

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.

Getting the data

sector-use observations from EIA (14,968 rows) (CSV)

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