What a company’s water number covers: exposure across held facilities

Withdrawal is not consumption, and at these operators the difference is a factor of tens: nearly all of it is once-through cooling water returned to the same water body.

The number a company total cannot show. An operator drawing a given volume from seventeen drainage basins and one drawing the same volume from a single basin are exposed to entirely different things — a drought in one catchment, against a drought anywhere.

Basin spread is derived from where facilities stand, not from where their water comes from. A plant standing in one basin and supplied by pipeline from another is counted in the first, so this measures geographic dispersion of assets rather than of water sourcing. It is the more robust of the two, because every located facility has a basin and only those the operator described have a stated source.

It is not a corporate water footprint, and it is not a ranking of companies. Hydrionis holds United States thermoelectric generating stations that filed a complete year of cooling water on a federal return; a company’s other plants, its other countries and its other businesses are all absent, and no attempt is made to estimate them.

Nor is it a corporate hierarchy. Operators appear exactly as they file — Duke Energy Carolinas and Duke Energy Progress are two entries here because they are two filers, and merging them into a parent would be a guess about company structure rather than a fact about water.

• Hydrionis Facility Water Relationships Dataset v1.0.0 · 49,588 observations
• Hydrionis Industrial Cooling Water Dataset v1.0.0 · 14,968 observations

Every figure above is computed from these datasets at build time rather than written into the text. If the underlying record changes, this page changes with it.