Top US oil production statistics

• EIA’s monthly series peaks at 13,995 thousand barrels a day in October 2025.
• Annual output rose 3%, or 350,000 barrels daily, in 2025 to a new record.
• Texas produced 5,761 thousand barrels daily in 2025, or 42.2% of the US total.
• New Mexico’s output went from 1,032 thousand b/d in 2020 to 2,205 in 2025.
• Offshore wells on the US Outer Continental Shelf produced a record 714 million barrels in 2025, BSEE reports.
• In 2025 the US exported 2,848 thousand barrels a day more crude oil and petroleum products than it imported, and every year since 2020 has been a net export year.
• US crude oil imports fell from 10,126 thousand b/d in 2005 to 6,168 in 2025.
• EIA’s January 2026 outlook expected 2027 output to fall 2% to 13.3 million barrels daily, a view it has since reversed.

How much oil does the US produce each year?

EIA’s annual series has US crude oil production at 13,662 thousand barrels per day in 2025, up from 5,000 in 2008.

Source: EIA, U.S. Field Production of Crude Oil, annual, released September 30, 2026. Crude oil includes lease condensate.

The 1970 row was the annual high for decades, and the 2018 row topped it. After 2008 the series dips at the 2016 row and again at the 2020 and 2021 rows.

What was the record year for US oil production?

EIA reported in May 2026 that the US pumped a record 13.6 million barrels of crude oil a day in 2025, above the previous record set in 2024.

EIA’s March 2026 article gave the same 13.6 million, and after its September 30, 2026 release the annual table reads 13,662 thousand barrels daily for 2025, which rounds to 13.7 million.

The record month is October 2025, at 13,995 thousand barrels daily, with April 2026 the closest since at 13,981. If you cite either one, say which you mean.

EIA revises its numbers. Rigzone reported in September 2025 that EIA’s table showed 2024 at 13.235 million barrels daily, and the table above now shows 13,267 thousand. The American Petroleum Institute’s website still calls 13.5 million barrels daily in December 2024 a record, a figure EIA’s monthly series has since passed.

What turned US oil production around after 2008?

A January 2026 preprint that hasn’t been peer reviewed credits horizontal drilling and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing with lifting US crude oil from 5 million barrels per day in 2008 to more than 12 million by 2019. The page on fracking for oil and gas covers the technique, and the page on the US shale gas boom covers the gas side of the story.

Output kept growing in 2025 while drilling slowed, and EIA reports that the average number of Lower 48 rigs was 5% below 2024 with 1% fewer wells drilled.

Oil executives answering the Dallas Fed’s survey for the third quarter of 2026 put the oil production index at 20.7, up from 15.0 in the second quarter. ExxonMobil reported record Permian production of more than 1.8 million oil-equivalent barrels a day for the second quarter of 2026, a figure that includes gas.

Which states produce the most oil?

Texas leads by a wide margin, with 5,761 thousand b/d against 2,205 for New Mexico in 2025, and the two together made 58.3% of the national figure.

Source: EIA, Crude Oil Production by state, annual. Federal offshore waters are not a state.

Federal offshore waters in the Gulf of America produced 1,942 thousand barrels daily in 2025, more than any state except Texas and New Mexico. North Dakota’s own count was 1,165,903 barrels daily in September 2025, within 1% of EIA’s estimate for the year, and the state says 97.5% came from the Bakken and Three Forks.

State agencies count differently from EIA. The Railroad Commission of Texas reported 4,083,173 barrels daily in December 2025 from oil leases, with condensate reported separately and the figure still preliminary, so it can’t be set against EIA’s full-year Texas estimate. EIA’s own note says its state estimates normally differ from state agency data.

If you live in Martin or Midland County, Texas, you’re in the two counties that pumped the most crude oil in December 2025, 21,192,493 barrels and 18,637,326.

How does US oil production compare with Saudi Arabia and Russia?

The US is ahead of both. EIA’s September 2026 outlook puts US crude for 2025 at 13.66 million barrels per day, against 9.33 for Saudi Arabia and 9.12 for Russia.

Source: EIA, Short-Term Energy Outlook Table 3d, September 2026 and EIA, Today in Energy, July 9, 2026, which cites EIA’s International Energy Statistics. Crude oil includes lease condensate for the US.

EIA publishes two sets of numbers for the same years. Its International Energy Statistics database has 9.6 million barrels daily for Saudi Arabia in 2025 and 9.9 million for Russia in 2024, with Russia largely unchanged in 2025. A note under the outlook table says country data can blur the line between crude oil and other liquids.

EIA also counts a wider measure of petroleum and other liquid fuels, and the outlook has US production on it at 23.69 million barrels daily in 2025. If you’ve seen a US figure near 24 million barrels daily, that’s the wider measure and it isn’t comparable with the crude numbers above.

How much oil does the US import and export?

The US imported 6,168 thousand barrels daily of crude oil in 2025 and exported 3,961.

Source: EIA, U.S. Imports of Crude Oil, U.S. Exports of Crude Oil and U.S. Net Imports of Crude Oil and Petroleum Products, annual, released September 30, 2026. A negative net figure means the US exported more than it imported.

The 2005 row is the peak, when the US imported 12,549 thousand barrels daily more crude oil and petroleum products than it exported. The monthly numbers crossed over before the annual ones did. EIA said that in September 2019 the US became a net petroleum exporter for the first time since monthly records began in 1973.

Congress ended the crude oil export ban in a law approved December 18, 2015, which says that no official of the Federal Government shall impose or enforce any restriction on the export of crude oil. In 2015 crude exports averaged 465 thousand barrels daily, against 3,961 in 2025. A National Academy of Engineering advisor wrote in 2018 that after a 40-year ban was lifted in 2015 the US had become an exporter of oil and liquefied natural gas.

The table also shows crude imports above crude exports in every row. The energy independence page covers what net exports do and don’t mean for supply.

What does EIA forecast for 2026 and 2027?

EIA’s September 2026 outlook, completed September 3, forecasts US crude oil production of 13.83 million barrels a day in 2026 and 14.26 million in 2027.

Source: EIA, Short-Term Energy Outlook Table 4a, September 2026. The three regional rows sit inside the Lower 48 row, and regions follow geography and don’t match geologic formations. The 2026 and 2027 columns are forecasts.

EIA says the 2026 forecast would surpass the previous record of 13.7 million barrels daily set in 2025. The first half of 2026 is already in the data, at 13.7 million barrels daily, 2% more than the first half of 2025.

The forecast moved between outlooks. EIA’s October 2025 outlook had 13.5 million barrels daily for 2026, its January 2026 outlook had 2027 falling to 13.3 million, and its July 2026 outlook raised 2027 to 14.0 million. The September outlook, in the table above, is higher again.

The September outlook was written during a Middle East conflict. EIA assessed crude oil shut-ins in the region at 6.7 million b/d in August 2026 and forecast Brent at about $90 a barrel in the second half of 2026. If you filled a tank in May 2026, EIA’s July outlook put the US average retail gasoline price at $4.48 a gallon and forecast about $3.60 for the second half of 2026, before the September outlook raised the Brent forecast. The page on why oil prices swing so much covers what moves those prices.

In its May 2026 report the IEA expected five Americas producers, the US among them, to deliver close to 1.5 million barrels daily of new supply in 2026.

How we compiled these numbers

We took annual production, state estimates, imports and exports from EIA’s data pages and forecasts from EIA’s September 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook. Crude oil means EIA’s field production of crude oil, which includes lease condensate, and it excludes the wider total of petroleum and other liquids. 2026 is a partial year, because EIA’s monthly series runs to July 2026.

We show EIA’s two sets of country figures side by side because they differ, and we left out Canada, China and Brazil because we couldn’t find one consistent crude oil source for them. The next outlook is due October 6, 2026 and the next monthly data October 30, 2026, and this page will be updated after both.

The Gulf of America projects already adding barrels

Four major Gulf of America projects have come online since January 2025, among them Shenandoah, which EIA says has produced an average of 70,000 barrels a day since July 2025. EIA expects four smaller projects by the end of 2026 and notes that hurricanes in the Gulf could disrupt the timeline.

Each table above links to the EIA page it came from, so open it, find the row for the year you need, and check the release date in the source line before you cite it, since EIA revises recent years.

Top photo: Edcdirector, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped.

Top coal statistics

• The Carboniferous Period lasted about 359.2 to 299 million years ago, and in the US its Pennsylvanian stage holds the coal-bearing layers, says the UC Berkeley Museum of Paleontology.
• Anthracite holds about twice the heat of lignite, about 15,000 Btu per pound against 7,000, according to USGS.
• In 2024, Wyoming mined 190.7 million short tons, which is 37.2% of the US total.
• US coal output peaked at 1,171.8 million short tons in 2008 and was 528.4 million in 2025.
• The US has the most proved coal reserves of any country, about 21% of the world total, says Stanford’s energy hub.
• EIA estimates US recoverable coal reserves at 249.4 billion short tons as of January 1, 2025.

How is coal formed?

Coal forms when swamp plants pile up as peat and then spend millions of years buried and heated. In Pennsylvania, the coal-forming plants first piled up about 320 million years ago, says the Pennsylvania Geological Survey.

The process starts with peat. USGS describes it as loosely consolidated layers of plant and mineral matter that build up in wetlands. Penn State’s coal outreach page says plants in oxygen-poor swamp water don’t rot away, since normal decay needs oxygen. In the Pennsylvanian swamps, plant material did not decay when the seas covered it.

Sediment then buries the peat. The Kentucky Geological Survey says the weight squeezes out much of the water from the peat and shrinks its volume.

How much plant debris makes a foot of coal depends on who you ask. North Dakota’s state history site says 10 feet of decayed vegetation make 1 foot of coal. Stanford’s energy hub says 20 meters of woody plant material make a 1-meter seam. Neither shows a method, and no geological survey page we opened gives a figure.

Heat does the rest of the work. The earth warms about 1 degree Fahrenheit for every 70 to 100 feet of depth, and the survey calls heating the primary control on how far coal advances.

Some of the original peat survives inside the finished coal. The Illinois State Geological Survey calls the stone lumps of fossil peat found in its coal seams coal balls. If a stream near you cuts into an Illinois coal bed, the survey says erosion can uncover them, and a fresh one looks like a rounded, dull brown rock crusted with coal.

What is coal made of?

The Pennsylvania Geological Survey’s table of example samples shows carbon rising from 59.0% in peat to 94.0% in Pennsylvania anthracite while the oxygen column falls the other way.

Source: Pennsylvania Geological Survey, Coal in Pennsylvania (Educational Series 7), adapted from a 1928 table. Each row is a single example sample.

Coal isn’t pure plant matter. Penn State’s coal outreach page says coal is not pure organic material, because minerals wash into the swamp and the plants carry their own ash.

How long does coal take to form, and how hot does it get?

Coal takes millions of years, and the US mines coal that formed more than 290 million years ago in West Virginia and about 60 million years ago in the Powder River Basin. West Virginia’s land kept sinking for more than 50 million years while swamps laid down its coal seams.

Source: e-WV, Illinois State Geological Survey, Wyoming State Geological Survey, Mining Technology and NDStudies.gov for the ages, and EIA’s Annual Coal Report 2024, Table 6 for the rank. North Dakota’s page says the last seas drained away early in the Cenozoic, which began about 65 million years ago, and gives no single age for the lignite. Illinois’s page gives the Pennsylvanian period and no age in years.

A PNAS commentary says the highest rates of organic carbon burial in the past half billion years came 330 to 260 million years ago, in large part from peat buried in broad tropical lowland basins.

The sources disagree on the age of western coal. EIA’s Energy Kids page says most US subbituminous coal is at least 100 million years old. The University of Calgary’s Energy Education site puts extensive coal deposits in the Cretaceous, 65 to 144 million years ago.

Wyoming’s geological survey says most of the state’s Paleogene coals are subbituminous, and Mining Technology dates the basin’s beds to about 60 million years ago. The table follows the Wyoming and Powder River dates, which name both the period and the basin.

The sources also disagree on what does the work. EIA says the rank of a deposit is determined by the pressure and heat that acted on the plants. Kentucky’s survey says pressure is a minor influence, and Wikipedia’s coal article says temperature is much more important than pressure or time of burial.

Temperatures by rank are harder to find. Wikipedia’s coal article says subbituminous coal can form at as low as 35 to 80 degrees Celsius. It puts anthracite at at least 180 to 245 degrees Celsius. No survey or federal page we opened gives figures, so treat both as one source’s numbers.

What are the four ranks of coal?

EIA sorts coal into four ranks, with lignite at the bottom and anthracite at the top. The table gives each rank’s carbon content, heating value and share of 2024 US output.

Source: EIA, Coal explained for carbon, NDStudies.gov for heating value, and shares computed from EIA’s Annual Coal Report 2024, Table 6.

The carbon figures here don’t match the Pennsylvania survey’s samples above. EIA’s ranges run lower than the survey’s examples for the same ranks, and EIA doesn’t say what basis its percentages use, so each stays in its own table.

The US average sits between the ranks. EIA reports that coal produced in the US averaged 20.383 million Btu per short ton in 2025, which works out to about 10,190 Btu per pound at 2,000 pounds per short ton.

Lignite stays close to home. If you live in lignite country, the power plant down the road probably burns it, and EIA says producers sell lignite almost exclusively to power plants near the mines.

Anthracite is the smallest rank. Pennsylvania’s 40 anthracite mines produced 2,958 thousand short tons in 2024.

Where does coal come from in the US?

Bituminous coal comes mainly from the Appalachian and Illinois Basins, subbituminous coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana, and lignite from the Midwest, mostly North Dakota and Texas. The table lists ten coal states by output.

Source: EIA, Annual Coal Report 2024, Tables 1 and 6. Pennsylvania’s total includes 3.0 million short tons of anthracite.

According to EIA’s 2022 ranking, the two largest US mines are both in Wyoming. Peabody reports that North Antelope Rochelle produced 65 million tons of coal in 2025 and holds 1.23 billion tons of proven and probable reserves.

How much of each kind of coal does the US mine?

Bituminous coal led in 2024 at 248.0 million short tons, ahead of 221.5 million for subbituminous. The table below runs year by year.

Source: EIA, Annual Coal Report 2024, Table ES1. Bituminous and anthracite include a small amount of refuse recovery. EIA hasn’t published 2025 production by rank.

In EIA’s Table ES1, bituminous and subbituminous swap the lead in 2010, 2011, 2015, 2017, 2020 and 2024. Every rank fell in 2020, and lignite fell in eight of the ten years from 2015 to 2024. Anthracite stays the smallest rank in every year.

How much coal is left in the US?

The US demonstrated reserve base, which is coal identified to set levels of accuracy, held about 468 billion short tons on January 1, 2025. Not all of that can be mined. Recoverable reserves, which EIA gets by removing coal that can’t be reached and applying mining recovery rates, were 249,351 million short tons.

Source: EIA, Annual Coal Report 2024, Table 15. Demonstrated reserve base as of January 1, 2025, and reserves at producing mines as of December 31, 2024.

The three states at the head of the reserves table hold 59.1% of the demonstrated reserve base, by arithmetic on the table. Montana holds the most coal in the ground, 25% of the base on January 1, 2023, yet it ranks fifth in output in the state table above.

If you’re wondering whether the US will run out, simple division gives about 486 years of recoverable reserves at the 2024 pace and about 21 years at producing mines. EIA does the same math and says the real number depends on changes in production and reserves estimates.

The last national USGS assessment, published in 1975, put US coal resources in the ground at 4 trillion short tons, and EIA says no newer national assessment exists.

How we sourced these numbers

The figures come from EIA’s Annual Coal Report for 2024, which holds final data for that year. EIA’s Coal explained pages still carry 2022 data, so definitions are all we took from them. The shares by rank, Wyoming’s share, the reserve percentage and the years of reserves are our arithmetic on EIA’s tables.

EIA counts in short tons of 2,000 pounds, and all tonnages here are short tons. The 2025 production total is from EIA’s Monthly Energy Review and can be revised. The history table ends at 2024, and EIA hasn’t published 2025 production by rank. We left out ages and ratios that a single non-survey source gives, unless the text names the source.

What EIA expects the US to mine in 2026 and 2027

EIA’s Short-Term Energy Outlook of September 2026 expects US coal production of 516 million short tons in 2026 and 497 million in 2027, down from 528 million in 2025. It also forecasts coal-fired generation falling 8% in 2026 and 6% in 2027. Both are forecasts, and EIA’s next outlook is due in October 2026.

The decline of coal on the US grid is tracked on its own page. For coal beside oil and gas, see the types of fossil fuels, and for a country that leaned on coal after closing its reactors, see Germany’s nuclear phase-out. The reserves table above shows how far apart the two measures sit. When you next see a US coal reserves number, check whether it’s the demonstrated reserve base or the much smaller figure for working mines.

Top photo: Peabody Energy, Inc., CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped.

Top natural gas statistics

• Dry natural gas production hit a record 39 trillion cubic feet in 2025, more than 4% above 2024.
• The US produced 25.6% of the world’s natural gas in 2025 by energy content, more than any other country, in Energy Institute data.
• Power plants were the biggest users, burning 13.05 Tcf in 2025, or 38.9% of all US gas use.
• LNG exports (liquefied natural gas, gas chilled into a liquid for shipping) reached 5.51 Tcf in 2025, up from 0.19 Tcf in 2016.
• In January 2026, natural gas prices averaged $7.72 per million Btu during Winter Storm Fern.
• The average US home paid $15.34 per thousand cubic feet in 2025, up from $10.78 in 2020, before inflation.
• Burning gas releases 45% less CO2 than burning coal for the same energy, a share computed from EIA’s emission coefficients.
• Aerial surveys of six US oil and gas regions found methane losses averaging 2.43% of covered gas production, roughly three times the government inventory estimate.
• The Department of Energy (DOE) counted 18.65 Bcf/d of LNG export capacity operating and 15.05 Bcf/d under construction on December 31, 2025, where Bcf/d means billion cubic feet per day.

What is natural gas?

Natural gas is a fossil fuel whose largest component is methane, a molecule with one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms. Wikipedia notes it’s also called methane gas or fossil gas.

On its own, natural gas is colorless, odorless and tasteless, so gas companies add mercaptan to give it a distinct and unpleasant odor, which helps people detect leaks in pipelines. If you’ve smelled gas in a kitchen or near a meter, that smell was the additive.

Where does natural gas come from, and where is it found?

Natural gas comes from the remains of plants and animals that piled up in thick layers millions of years ago, and pressure and heat later changed some of that buried material into natural gas.

Large-scale shale gas production began around 2000 in the Barnett Shale of north central Texas, and EIA says the Marcellus shale in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia is the largest source of shale gas. For how those wells are drilled, see how fracking works, and the shale gas page covers how that output grew.

Oil wells bring gas up too. In the Permian region of Texas and New Mexico, gas production is driven primarily by associated gas produced during crude oil extraction, and EIA forecasts 29.2 Bcf/d there in 2026. Gas taken from coal seams is called coalbed methane, and it made about 2% of US dry gas production in 2022.

Texas produced 12.66 Tcf of marketed gas in 2025, which is 29.3% of the US total. Pennsylvania came second.

Source: EIA, Natural Gas Gross Withdrawals and Production, marketed production by state. Shares are computed from the US total on the same page, and the ten states listed make up 94.5% of it.

Marketed production is a wider EIA measure than the dry production used in the other tables, which is why the US total in the table is 43.23 Tcf. New Mexico’s output rose from 1.97 Tcf in 2020 to 4.13 Tcf in 2025, more than double.

How much natural gas does the US produce, use and export?

The US used 33.52 Tcf of natural gas in 2025 and exported 8.97 Tcf, counting pipelines and LNG. Imports were 3.16 Tcf, so net exports came to 5.80 Tcf by subtraction.

Source: EIA, Dry Natural Gas Production, Natural Gas Total Consumption, Natural Gas Exports and Liquefied Natural Gas Exports, annual data released September 30, 2026. EIA publishes volumes in million cubic feet, and the table divides them by one million. Exports include pipeline gas and LNG.

In the table, dry production passes consumption in 2017 and stays above it. LNG exports rose from 0.19 Tcf in 2016 to 5.51 Tcf in 2025.

EIA’s explainer page says the US has been a net exporter since 2016, but its annual tables show imports of 3.01 Tcf in 2016 against exports of only 2.34 Tcf in the table above, and 2017 was the first year exports came out ahead.

On EIA’s marketed-gas measure, which runs higher than dry gas, production reached a record 118.5 Bcf/d in 2025, and EIA forecasts 122.5 Bcf/d in 2026.

What is natural gas used for?

Electric power was the largest use of natural gas in 2025, at 13.05 Tcf. Industry came next.

Source: EIA, Natural Gas Consumption by End Use, 2025. Shares are computed from the total on the same page. EIA treats the latest year’s power-sector volumes as preliminary.

In July 2026, power plants took 49.39 Bcf/d, the highest daily rate for any month in EIA’s data, which starts in 2001. In homes, gas supplied about 43% of the energy used in 2020.

Trade groups count customers differently from EIA and don’t date their figures. The American Gas Association (AGA) says more than 189 million Americans and 5.8 million businesses use natural gas, and the Natural Gas Supply Association says nearly 70 million US homes are heated with it. EIA’s 58% figure comes from a survey of homes, so it’s the one to compare against.

Vehicle fuel is the smallest line in the table. The natural gas vehicles page covers where it’s used.

How much LNG does the US export?

US LNG exports averaged 17.4 Bcf/d in the first half of 2026, 23% more than in the first half of 2025. LNG is natural gas chilled to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit, where it becomes a liquid 600 times smaller than the gas.

Reuters reported, citing preliminary LSEG data, that the US shipped 111 million metric tons of LNG in 2025, the first country to pass 100 million. WorkBoat reported 2025 exports of 15.1 Bcf/d, a record.

In March 2026, disruptions to shipments through the Strait of Hormuz cut off 20% of global LNG supplies, mostly from Qatar, according to EIA. The IEA expects global gas demand to fall about 0.5% in 2026.

Cheniere says its Sabine Pass terminal had exported more than 3,460 LNG cargoes totaling about 240 million tonnes as of July 31, 2026. Golden Pass, the ninth US LNG terminal, shipped its first cargo on April 22, 2026, and EIA lists its full nominal capacity at 2.0 Bcf/d.

Source: US Department of Energy, Liquefied Natural Gas Exports snapshot, December 2025. Capacity is the volume DOE lists as operating or under construction on December 31, 2025. The under-construction rows leave out Corpus Christi Stage 3, which DOE counts in its 15.05 Bcf/d total, and Golden Pass has shipped since.

How much does natural gas cost?

The Henry Hub benchmark spot price averaged $3.52 per million Btu in 2025. It was $6.45 in 2022 and $2.19 in 2024. Over the same two years the residential price went from $14.75 to $14.50 per thousand cubic feet.

Source: EIA, Henry Hub Natural Gas Spot Price, Residential, Commercial, Industrial and Electric Power delivered prices, annual, in nominal dollars. Henry Hub is in dollars per million Btu and the delivered prices are in dollars per thousand cubic feet (Mcf). EIA’s annual Henry Hub series has no value for 2013, so the table starts in 2014.

The residential price was 42% higher in 2025 than in 2020 before inflation, a share computed from EIA’s price table.

In January 2026, natural gas prices averaged $7.72 per million Btu as cold weather increased heating demand, reduced production and led to record storage withdrawals during Winter Storm Fern. EIA’s February forecast for the 2026 average was $4.30, and its September forecast is $3.43 for 2026 and $3.28 for 2027.

What are the pros and cons of natural gas?

EIA calls natural gas a relatively clean-burning fossil fuel. Its coefficients put the carbon dioxide from burning gas at 52.91 kilograms per million Btu, against 95.99 for coal.

Source: EIA, Carbon Dioxide Emissions Coefficients by Fuel. The figures count combustion only and leave out methane that leaks before the gas is burned.

Lower carbon dioxide per unit of energy is one advantage, and a record 39 trillion cubic feet of domestic production in 2025 is another. The drawbacks are the carbon dioxide that gas still releases and the price swings in the table above. Then there’s methane, and EIA says some natural gas leaks into the atmosphere from wells and storage tanks as well as pipelines and processing plants. For how gas compares with coal and oil more broadly, see the fossil fuels page.

How much methane leaks from natural gas?

Methane is a strong greenhouse gas. EPA estimates its global warming potential at 27 to 30 over 100 years, though methane emitted today lasts about a decade in the air.

EPA’s 2022 estimates put 60% of oil and gas methane in production and 19% in transmission and storage. MIT Technology Review reported that EPA estimates roughly 1% of oil and gas produced leaks as methane.

Aerial measurements point higher than the inventory. A Nature study covering six US regions found losses ranging from 0.71% to 9.77% of covered gas production, the low end in a gas-rich region and the high end in an oil-focused one. Lead author Evan Sherwin says around 1% of well sites can make up over half the total methane emissions. Nature published a correction in May 2026, and the authors say the main results are unchanged.

Worldwide, the IEA estimates that oil, gas and coal operations emit 124 million tonnes of methane a year, including 36 million from natural gas, and that more than 35 million tonnes could be avoided at no net cost. The methane leaks page covers where the gas escapes.

Where these numbers come from

We converted EIA’s volumes from million cubic feet to trillion cubic feet and rounded to two decimals, and every share in the tables is computed from the totals on the same EIA page.

The world share comes from Energy Institute data published by Our World in Data in terawatt-hours of energy, a different basis from the volumes above. EIA’s next Short-Term Energy Outlook is due October 6, 2026, and the next Natural Gas Monthly comes October 30, 2026, and the forecasts and monthly figures here will move with them.

The LNG terminals already under construction in Texas and Louisiana

DOE counted 15.05 Bcf/d of LNG export capacity under construction at the end of 2025, with Rio Grande, Golden Pass, Louisiana LNG, CP2 and two phases of Port Arthur on the list. EIA’s September forecast has US LNG exports averaging 17.4 Bcf/d in 2026 and 18.6 Bcf/d in 2027.

Further out, EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook 2026 projects exports rising from 15 Bcf/d in 2025 to more than 30 Bcf/d by 2050 in most of its cases.

If you heat with gas, the residential column in the price table above shows the average rate US households paid each year, so it’s the line to compare your own bill against.

Top photo: BogTar201213, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped.

The figures below come mostly from EIA and other federal and state agencies, and they describe 2024 or 2025 unless a line says otherwise.

Top fracking statistics

• Tight-oil resources produced 9.35 million barrels a day of US crude in 2025, EIA estimates.
• US crude oil production set a record 13.6 million barrels a day in 2025.
• The Permian Basin’s shale and tight formations made 6.0 million barrels a day of crude oil in December 2025, which was 44% of the US total.
• Gas made up 40% of Bakken, Eagle Ford and Permian output in 2024 when measured in barrels of oil equivalent, up from 29% in 2014.
• EPA estimated that 25,000 to 30,000 new wells were drilled and fractured in the US each year from 2011 to 2014.
• Pennsylvania operators spud 444 new wells in 2025, up from 309 in 2024.
• Baker Hughes counted 599 US rigs in the week published on September 25, 2026, and 541 of them were horizontal.
• US natural gas production was 104 billion cubic feet a day in 2023, 75% above Russia’s.
• A study of 2015 data put US oil and gas methane emissions at 13 million metric tons a year, 60% above EPA’s estimate.
• Texas has required operators to post fracking chemicals on FracFocus since February 1, 2012.

What is fracking?

Fracking is a completion technique, meaning it happens after the well has been drilled. Pumps force fluid down the well until the rock cracks, and the sand in the fluid wedges open the expanding fractures.

Fracking and horizontal drilling are separate steps that work together. Hydraulically fractured horizontal wells were 69% of all US oil and gas wells drilled in 2016.

Commercial shale gas began in the Barnett Shale in Texas, where Mitchell Energy had developed a fracturing technique that produced commercial volumes of shale gas by 2000.

How does fracking work?

A fracked well reaches formations hundreds or thousands of feet below the surface. Modern shale wells then run sideways through the rock, and in the Permian Basin the horizontal section averaged more than 10,000 feet in the first nine months of 2022, against under 4,000 feet in 2010.

Longer sections came with more wells. Operators in the Permian brought on 4,524 new horizontal wells in 2021, up from 350 in 2010.

On the well pad, water, proppant and additives are blended together and pumped to a manifold, where high pressure pumps transfer the fluid to the frac head. Water tanks hold the supply, and flowback tanks hold the liquid that returns to the surface afterward.

Liberty Energy, a frac service company, says its SLXRRY sand delivery system enables reduced truck traffic and road wear, plus less dust and fewer emissions. The company’s release gives no measurements.

A typical fracking job is 85.02% water and 14.20% proppant, according to FracFocus. The remaining 0.78% is ten additive types, from a gellant at 0.5% down to a biocide at 0.001%.

Source: FracFocus, What Is Fracturing Fluid Made Of?. FracFocus calls this a generalized breakdown of a typical job and says there is no standard formula.

How much US oil comes from fracking?

Tight-oil resources produced about 64% of US crude oil in 2023, according to EIA. In 2025 the share was 68.4% when computed, from EIA’s estimate of tight oil and its count of US field production.

Source: EIA, Today in Energy, March 15, 2016, EIA FAQ on tight oil, EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook Table 10b, September 2026 and EIA field production of crude oil. The 2025 share is 9.35 divided by 13.662.

The rows don’t form one trend line. In 2015 EIA counted about 300,000 fractured wells that made more than 4.3 million barrels a day, about half of US crude. That count sorts oil by whether the well was fractured, while the 2023 and 2025 rows sort it by the rock it came from.

The next table gives total US crude output for scale. It covers every kind of US oil well, fracked or not.

Source: EIA, U.S. Field Production of Crude Oil, annual, released September 30, 2026.

How much US natural gas comes from fracking?

Shale gas wells brought up 35.1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in 2024, which is 76.5% of the 45.9 trillion cubic feet withdrawn from all US wells, computed from EIA’s two figures. These are gross withdrawals.

Source: EIA, U.S. Natural Gas Gross Withdrawals from Shale Gas and EIA, U.S. Natural Gas Gross Withdrawals, converted from million cubic feet and rounded to 0.01 trillion cubic feet. EIA’s shale series ends in 2024.

By the same computation, shale wells were 8.1% of the total in 2007 and 21.7% in 2010.

Oil wells make gas too. In the Bakken, Eagle Ford and Permian, gas was 40% of output in 2024, up from 29% in 2014, measured in barrels of oil equivalent.

EIA’s outlook tables count something different, dry shale gas by formation, so they shouldn’t be set against gross withdrawals. For how shale changed gas prices and power plants, see how shale gas changed the US energy market.

Where does fracking happen in the US?

The Permian Basin leads oil, and its shale and tight formations made 44% of US crude in December 2025. The Marcellus leads shale gas in the table below, which counts by rock formation, and formations cross state lines.

Source: EIA, Short-Term Energy Outlook Table 10b, September 2026. Rows may not sum to the totals because EIA rounds each line independently.

EIA ranks Appalachia, which holds the Marcellus and Utica, second among the world’s gas-producing areas at 33 billion cubic feet a day in 2023.

The state table below counts all production in each state, including wells that were never fracked.

Source: EIA, Crude Oil Production by state and EIA, Natural Gas Marketed Production by state, annual 2025 values.

Texas leads both columns. Pennsylvania ranks second for marketed gas among these nine states and last for oil.

Where is fracking regulated or banned?

Pennsylvania’s Act 13 was signed into law on February 14, 2012 and created an impact fee on unconventional gas wells. In 2026 the state’s utility commission distributed $243.8 million for the 2025 reporting year, and $133.8 million of it went to counties and municipalities directly affected by drilling. If drilling is happening in your Pennsylvania county, your local government is likely among the recipients.

Texas took a different route. Its Railroad Commission implemented a chemical disclosure rule on February 1, 2012, and the rule text names FracFocus, developed by the Ground Water Protection Council and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, as the registry where operators post. The same rule lets suppliers claim a chemical’s name as a trade secret.

New York went further. In December 2014, Governor Andrew Cuomo banned fracking across New York State, which holds large gas reserves in the Marcellus Shale. In February 2021, all four Delaware River Basin states voted to ban the practice in the watershed, citing scientific evidence that fracking has polluted drinking water, surface water and groundwater.

Source: Railroad Commission of Texas, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, ProPublica and WHYY.

What are the benefits of fracking?

The US has led the world in natural gas production since 2009, according to EIA, and the history table above shows shale wells behind that growth.

Burning natural gas makes fewer emissions of nearly all air pollutants and carbon dioxide than burning coal or petroleum products for the same energy. EIA puts coal at more than 200 pounds of carbon dioxide per million Btu and fuel oil at more than 160 pounds. That comparison counts the burning of the fuel and leaves out leaks, which are covered below.

Some of that gas fuels vehicles, and the page on vehicles that run on natural gas covers them.

Does fracking cause earthquakes?

USGS says reports of hydraulic fracturing causing felt earthquakes are extremely rare. It adds that most induced earthquakes are not directly caused by fracking and that the rise in central US earthquakes is primarily caused by disposal of waste fluids that are a byproduct of oil production.

If you live in the central United States and feel a tremor, USGS points to wastewater disposal wells as the main cause. The page on how much water fracking uses covers disposal in detail.

What does fracking do to water, air and health?

EPA’s 2016 assessment found scientific evidence that activities in the hydraulic fracturing water cycle can impact drinking water resources under some circumstances. In its sample, 13 of 151 characterized spills of fracturing fluid reached a surface water body.

A 2013 study in northeastern Pennsylvania found methane concentrations six times higher and ethane 23 times higher at homes within a kilometer of a shale gas well. If your water comes from a private well that close to a drilling pad, that’s the distance where the researchers saw the difference. The finding covered a subset of wells.

On air, EPA says the oil and natural gas sector is the largest industrial source of US methane emissions. A study of 2015 data put the sector’s methane at 13 million metric tons a year, 60% more than EPA’s inventory estimated.

That covers the whole oil and gas system, so fracking is one part of it. The guide to methane leaks from US oil and gas goes through the measurements.

Researchers who analyzed more than 1.1 million Pennsylvania births from 2004 to 2013 found a 25% higher probability of low birth weight for mothers living within 1 km of a fracking site. They found little evidence of effects beyond 3 km. If your home is within a kilometer of a well pad, that’s the group the study describes. It’s one study in one state.

Where these numbers come from

We compiled the figures from EIA data pages and outlooks, other federal agencies, FracFocus, state regulators and peer-reviewed studies, and we checked the linked pages in September 2026.

Some numbers are computed. Each shale share of gross withdrawals divides EIA’s shale gas figure by its all-wells figure. The 2025 tight oil share divides EIA’s tight oil estimate by its US field production figure. The gas history table converts EIA’s million cubic feet into trillions.

Shares of dry or marketed gas use different denominators and will differ from the gross withdrawals share. EIA’s fractured-well count and its tight-oil count use different definitions, so the oil table labels each row. The state table covers all production in each state, including wells that were never fracked.

What the rig count and EIA’s forecasts say about the next wells

Baker Hughes counted 455 oil rigs and 135 gas rigs in the US in the week published on September 25, 2026.

EIA’s January 2026 outlook forecast that US crude oil production would dip 2% to 13.3 million barrels a day in 2027, and it said low crude oil prices reduce operators’ incentives to drill.

For gas, EIA’s February 2026 outlook forecast marketed production of 120.8 billion cubic feet a day in 2026 and a record 122.3 in 2027. About 69% of that comes from Appalachia, Haynesville and the Permian. EIA’s April 2026 outlook expected LNG exports to average 17.0 billion cubic feet a day in 2026.

FracFocus describes its database of chemical disclosures as a public resource for consumers wishing to explore this data. If a rig goes up near you, that’s where to look up what went into the well, provided its operator posted the ingredients.

Top fossil fuel statistics

• World energy supply passed 600 exajoules in 2025, up 1.7% on 2024, according to the Energy Institute.
• The world used 103 million barrels of oil a day in 2025, 1.3% more than in 2024.
• Coal fell from 37% of US energy use in 1950 to 9% in 2025.
• Researchers at the Global Carbon Project projected fossil CO2 emissions of 38.1 billion tonnes in 2025, a record high.
• Carbon dioxide in the air at Mauna Loa averaged 427.55 ppm in August 2026, up from 425.48 ppm a year earlier.
• Global fossil power generation fell 38 TWh in 2025, the first year without a rise since 2020.
• The IMF counted $725 billion in explicit fossil fuel subsidies in 2024.
• Brent crude went above $100 a barrel in March 2026 after Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz.

What are fossil fuels?

Fossil fuels come in three types, and all three began as the remains of plants and animals. Over time, pressure and heat changed some of that buried material into coal and some into oil and gas.

Coal holds the energy of plants that lived hundreds of millions of years ago in swampy forests. Crude oil formed from animals and plants, called diatoms, that lived millions of years ago in a marine environment.

The table sets the three fuels side by side.

Source: Our World in Data (OWID) on energy use and OWID on CO2 by fuel, which build on the Energy Institute Statistical Review 2026 and the Global Carbon Budget 2025. Emission coefficients come from EIA and US shares from EIA. The exajoule and share columns are arithmetic on the Energy Institute series. EIA rounds each US share, so the three fuels add to 83 while EIA’s fossil total is 82.

Oil is the biggest of the three by energy at 201.0 exajoules in 2025. Coal is the biggest by CO2, at 15.81 billion tonnes in 2024.

How much of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels?

Fossil fuels supplied 86.2% of world primary energy in 2025, down from 95.7% in 1975.

The table gives world use of coal, oil and natural gas in exajoules, a unit of energy.

Source: OWID on global primary energy use, built on the Energy Institute Statistical Review 2026 and converted from terawatt-hours to exajoules.

Natural gas use grew fastest of the three, from 87.5 exajoules in 2001 to 150.7 in 2025.

The Energy Institute counts world coal use up 0.7% and the IEA counts it up about 0.4%. For total energy, the IEA counts 1.3% growth against 1.7% in the Energy Institute’s review.

Which countries depend on fossil fuels the most?

Saudi Arabia got 99.4% of its primary energy from fossil fuels in 2025, the highest share in the table, and Norway got 46.9%.

Source: OWID on fossil fuel share of energy, built on the Energy Institute Statistical Review 2026.

The table’s US figure comes from the Energy Institute’s data, while EIA’s own count for 2025 is 82%.

What are fossil fuels used for?

Transportation takes the largest share of US petroleum, 66.6% in 2022, according to EIA. The American Petroleum Institute, an oil and gas trade group, puts transportation fuels at 68% of US petroleum product demand in 2024.

EPA says over 94% of the fuel used for transportation is petroleum based.

Electricity is another use. About 60% of US electricity came from fossil fuels in 2023, so if you live in the US, most of the electricity behind your bill that year came from a fossil-fueled plant.

Worldwide, coal alone made 33.0% of electricity in 2025, behind renewable energy sources at 33.8%, Ember found. Solar power rose 636 TWh to 2,778 TWh in 2025, a 30% increase.

What happens when fossil fuels are burned?

Burning fossil fuels releases CO2, and a short ton of coal gives off 1,735.85 kilograms of it.

For the same amount of heat, coal releases 95.99 kilograms of CO2 per million Btu and natural gas 52.91, which puts coal at about 1.8 times gas.

Three groups gave three totals for 2025. The Global Carbon Budget paper projects 38.1 billion tonnes of fossil CO2, including cement carbonation. The Energy Institute counts 35,806.2 million tonnes from the energy sector, and the IEA counts nearly 38.4 billion tonnes of energy-related CO2. The three totals cover different sets of sources.

Natural gas caused 85 million of the 185 million tonnes by which the IEA says combustion emissions rose in 2025.

The same research puts what’s left of the 1.5°C carbon budget at 170 billion tonnes of CO2, about four years at 2025 emissions. The IPCC found that existing fossil fuel infrastructure would emit more CO2 over its lifetime than 1.5°C pathways allow.

How much fossil fuel is left?

US operators reported about 46 billion barrels of proved crude oil and lease condensate reserves at year-end 2024, 1% less than a year earlier. Proved natural gas reserves fell 3% to 584 trillion cubic feet.

Proved reserves are operators’ estimates of what can be recovered under existing economic and operating conditions, so they’re not a count of everything in the ground. For how shale changed US supply, see shale gas in the US.

OWID’s series from EIA lists 1,165.9 billion tonnes of proved coal reserves worldwide for 2023, the same figure it shows for 2022.

How much do fossil fuels cost?

Brent crude averaged $69.14 a barrel in 2025, and the table shows what oil and gas cost each year since 2014 in nominal dollars.

Source: EIA, Europe Brent Spot Price FOB, EIA, Cushing WTI Spot Price, EIA, Henry Hub Natural Gas Spot Price. EIA’s annual gas table has no 2013 value, so this table starts in 2014.

Prices jumped in 2026 when Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, pushing oil above $100 a barrel in March, the highest since 2022. The strait normally carries about one-fifth of global oil supplies.

The IEA agreed to release 400 million barrels from emergency stocks, the largest coordinated drawdown in its history. EIA estimates Brent averaged $102.93 in the second quarter of 2026.

EIA’s September outlook forecasts Brent averaging $91 a barrel in 2026 and $74 in 2027. If you drive, EIA forecasts regular gasoline at $3.84 a gallon in 2026 against $3.10 in 2025, a difference of 74 cents on every gallon you buy.

Henry Hub gas averaged $6.45 per million Btu in 2022 and $3.52 in 2025. For what moves oil prices, see oil prices and OPEC.

What are the pros and cons of fossil fuels?

The main advantage is a lot of energy in a small tank. A gallon of diesel holds 128,488 Btu, and a gallon of gasoline with ethanol blended in holds 112,114 to 116,090.

Another is jobs. The American Petroleum Institute says the US oil and gas industry supported 10.6 million jobs and contributed $2.1 trillion to the US economy in 2023.

Cost is a mixed argument. Lazard’s 2026 analysis puts new combined-cycle gas at $51 to $129 per megawatt-hour, unsubsidized. It puts new utility-scale solar at $40 to $98. Those are unsubsidized costs of building and running new plants, a different measure from the price on your bill.

Then there’s health. A 2023 BMJ study estimated 5.13 million excess deaths a year from air pollution caused by fossil fuels, using 2019 data. A Harvard-led study of 2018 put the figure at more than 8 million. The two studies cover different years and use different models.

Subsidies are the last piece. The IMF counted $725 billion in explicit subsidies in 2024 and $6.7 trillion in implicit ones, which are mostly environmental costs that prices leave out. The page on fossil fuel subsidies goes through them.

How we worked out these numbers

We took each fuel’s use from Our World in Data’s copy of the Energy Institute’s 2026 Statistical Review and converted terawatt-hours to exajoules at 277.78 per exajoule, since one terawatt-hour is 3.6 petajoules. Each fuel’s share is its use divided by the world total of 600.3 exajoules, which we summed from the same series.

The emissions totals for 2025 are projections or estimates, and EIA’s prices for 2026 are forecasts. We couldn’t verify a current world total for oil and gas reserves from a source that opens freely, so the reserves section gives US figures for those two fuels.

Two outlooks for coal, oil and gas to 2050

The IEA’s Current Policies Scenario in its 2025 outlook has oil and gas demand growing to mid-century, with coal declining before 2030. Its Stated Policies Scenario has oil demand flattening by the end of the decade and gas growing into the 2030s.

ExxonMobil’s outlook has oil and natural gas making up more than half of world energy supply in 2050, and expects the world to use 30% less coal in 2050 than in 2025. Both are scenarios.

To see how coal’s share of US energy fell, read why US coal power keeps declining. For what shale drilling means for local water, see fracking water use.

More than 175,000 natural gas vehicles run in the US, and the fuel behind them still costs about a quarter less than gasoline at the pump. That price gap never built a mass market here.

Pakistan and Iran turned to compressed natural gas on a national scale decades ago, and Italy built pumps to match. The US mostly stuck with fleets that fuel at their own depot, like buses and delivery trucks.

If you already drive a natural gas vehicle, that price gap shows up every time you fill up. If you don’t, you’ll see why below.

Natural gas vehicles in the US today

The US counted 1,385 CNG stations and 81 LNG stations in 2025, next to 85,692 public EV charging ports that same year. The refueling network has moved backward since its mid-2010s peak. The same DOE page reports that CNG station counts fell after 2016, as some stations closed and fleets moved on to other fuels.

A CNG tank holds its fuel at up to 3,600 pounds per square inch, squeezed into a thick steel cylinder that eats up much of a trunk or a pickup bed. That’s the tradeoff a natural gas vehicle asks you to make. You get less room to haul your stuff, in exchange for a cheaper fill-up.

Most of the gas moving through those stations comes from domestic shale production. Our explainer on fracking water use covers that supply side.

What CNG costs compared with gasoline

As of April 2026, retail CNG averaged $3.08 per gasoline-gallon-equivalent nationwide, against $4.09 for a gallon of gasoline. That’s a gap of about $1.01 per GGE, roughly a quarter less than gasoline.

Fill up at a CNG pump instead of a gas pump, and you’d see that gap every time the pump shuts off. The sticker price doesn’t reflect it, and neither does the extra distance you might drive hunting for a station. Short errands around town make the fuel savings add up slowly. Driving the same route all day for work makes them add up fast.

One gasoline-gallon-equivalent works out to 5.66 pounds of compressed natural gas, the conversion the Department of Energy uses to compare the two fuels on one scale. Without it, a price quoted in dollars per hundred cubic feet wouldn’t tell you anything about miles per dollar.

Why the US share stayed so small

In 2023, transportation used about 4% of all US natural gas, and 96% of that went to power pipeline compressors, not vehicles. Nearly all the natural gas that vehicles do burn runs through government and private fleets using CNG or LNG, per the same source. If your town runs its buses or utility trucks on natural gas, that fleet is most of the country’s natural-gas-vehicle story right there.

Natural gas, a fossil fuel, has counted as a federally tracked alternative transportation fuel for decades, alongside hydrogen fuel and propane, but the market under it never grew the way Pakistan’s, Iran’s or Italy’s did.

Where natural gas trucks and buses still make sense

Natural gas engines still pencil out in vehicles that return to the same yard every night and run high mileage all day. The DOE’s Alternative Fuels Data Center points to that profile in refuse trucks and transit buses, which fuel at a central depot instead of hunting for a public station. Watch a garbage truck or a transit bus pull away from a curb, and there’s a decent chance it runs on natural gas fueled at its own depot, never at a pump you’d recognize.

Heavy trucks more often run on LNG than CNG. The Class 7 and 8 rigs that haul regional freight fit that pattern, per the same AFDC source, because they fuel at their own depots instead of at a retail pump. Only 81 LNG stations serve the whole country, a shortage that matters far less to a fleet fueling at its own depot than to you if you’re hunting for a public pump.

Where CNG fleets got built decades before the US caught on

Natural gas vehicles made up roughly 80% of Pakistan’s vehicle fleet by 2013, more than 2 million vehicles running on compressed natural gas, according to Geoffrey Styles’ account on his blog Energy Outlook. He linked that to Pakistan’s push to cut its dependence on imported petroleum.

Iran’s CNG adoption ran higher still. Styles attributed it to international sanctions that restricted imports of gasoline and other refined fuels, which left Iranian drivers running on whatever fuel their own refineries could still produce. No public, sourced count newer than Styles’ 2013 figures turned up for either country’s fleet size.

Italy built its own natural gas car culture the same way. Styles reported that more than 11% of new cars sold in Italy in 2012 were natural-gas-capable, against 0.01% in the US that same year. Italy backed those sales with a government purchase subsidy of about €700, worth roughly $945 at the 2013 exchange rate. The country also ran more than 40% more CNG stations than the entire US, even though Italy had 83% fewer vehicles overall.

Both figures date to 2012 and 2013. Nobody has published a newer count of Italy’s natural gas fleet since.

The price gap that favors CNG today isn’t new either. In 2011, wholesale natural gas cost under $0.60 per gasoline-gallon-equivalent, while retail CNG ran under $2.00 per GGE in many parts of the country, according to Styles’ 2013 account. Even at that price, natural gas made up less than 3% of US transportation energy that year. Cheap fuel alone never built a fleet here the way it did in Pakistan and Iran.

Where EVs pulled ahead of natural gas

Per the IEA’s count, the world sold more than 17 million electric vehicles in 2024, over 20% of new cars sold that year. That single year of global sales of electric cars already dwarfs Pakistan’s and Iran’s combined CNG fleets from Styles’ 2013 count.

China shows the pace clearest. More than 11 million EVs sold there in 2024, about half the country’s new car sales, and 1 in 10 cars on Chinese roads is now electric. In the US, where natural gas never moved past a niche, more than 1 in 10 new cars sold in 2024 were electric. The battery energy storage explainer covers how much cheaper batteries got over that same stretch.

If you’re weighing an alternative to gasoline for your next vehicle, our explainer on electric vehicle adoption covers what’s driving the numbers above and what they could mean for the next vehicle you buy.

A typical horizontal shale gas well uses a median of about 5.1 million gallons of water to frack, and wells range from 2,600 gallons to 9.7 million, according to the US Geological Survey’s first national study of the practice.

In the Permian Basin, the water that comes back out of a well is now a bigger problem than the water that goes into it. That water has to go somewhere once the well starts producing, and moving or disposing of it costs money and carries risks of its own.

How much water one fracked well uses

The USGS study covered wells fracked from 2000 to 2014, and volumes rose throughout. A horizontal oil well used a median of about 177,000 gallons in 2000. By 2014 the median had passed 4 million gallons, more than twenty times the 2000 figure. Horizontal gas wells reached the 5.1 million gallon median by the end of the study.

The climb continued after 2014, as operators kept drilling longer horizontal wells across US shale basins. In the Permian Basin, water use per foot of horizontal well rose from 350 gallons in 2011 to 2,335 gallons in 2016, a nearly sevenfold jump that Duke University researchers documented. If you live near shale country in Texas, a new well going up near you is likely one of these longer laterals, using far more water per foot than shorter wells once did.

Total freshwater use for fracking in the Permian rose about 770% over those five years as both effects compounded. The Marcellus shale in Appalachia went the other way. Total water use there stayed roughly flat over the same period, because fewer new wells were drilled each year even as each one used more. A region’s total can hold steady while its per-well figure keeps rising.

How fracking compares with other US water use

The United States withdrew about 322 billion gallons of water a day in 2015, the latest full national accounting from USGS.

Source: USGS, Total Water Use in the United States

Add 133 and 118 billion gallons a day from the table above and thermoelectric power and irrigation come to about 78% of that total. Public water supply, the pipes that fill your tap and toilet at home, draws 39 billion gallons a day nationally, a little less than a third of what thermoelectric plants draw to cool their turbines. Thermoelectric plants alone withdrew more than thirty times as much as mining, which drew 4 billion gallons a day, about 1% of all withdrawals.

Fracking doesn’t appear as its own line in that accounting, and no federal agency publishes a current national total for the water it uses. Any national percentage for fracking is an estimate built from older per-well and well-count figures, not a current tally.

Why location matters more than the national total

A small national share can still be a big local one. In 2013, Ceres mapped more than 25,000 oil and gas wells and found that almost half sat in water basins with high water stress, as the World Resources Institute reported. That analysis didn’t account for water moved between basins or for the difference between water withdrawn and water consumed.

West Texas shows why that gap matters. Severe drought covered about 34% of Texas as of September 22, 2026, according to the US Drought Monitor. That’s the same region where Permian freshwater use for fracking climbed 770% in five years, while in the Marcellus, flush with rain, the same climb barely registered.

Five million gallons drawn from a basin with plenty of water is a rounding error. The same volume drawn where farms and towns already compete for a stressed supply is a real claim on it, whatever the national percentage says. If your town sits in one of those stressed West Texas basins, that single well’s water is competing directly with what your community needs for drinking supplies and crops.

The water that comes back up

Every fracked well also returns water to the surface for as long as it produces, a mix of fracturing fluid flowing back and water that was already in the rock, which the industry calls produced water. In the Permian Basin it runs past 20 million barrels a day, against Permian oil output of about 6.2 million barrels a day in mid-2024, more than three barrels of water for every barrel of oil.

That water outlives the barrel of oil it came up with. It still has to go somewhere long after that oil turns into the gas you put in your car.

The Society of Petroleum Engineers’ journal expects Permian produced water to pass 26 million barrels a day by 2030, and calls water management the basin’s biggest challenge. Some of that water gets treated and reused on the next well. The rest gets trucked away in convoys of tanker trucks or piped straight into a disposal well and pumped thousands of feet underground.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s 2016 assessment of fracking and drinking water looked at the whole water cycle, from acquiring water through disposal. The water a well takes in is one step in that cycle.

Disposal, earthquakes and the cost of recycling

The cost of handling produced water depends on the method. Trucking it to a disposal site can cost up to $2.50 a barrel, while recycling it for another well runs 15 to 20 cents, well under the trucking cost. Piping it into a disposal well falls in between, at 25 cents to $1.00 a barrel. If a disposal well goes up near your town instead of a recycling facility, cost is usually why, since dumping the water underground is still far cheaper than treating it for reuse.

Why regulators are already limiting some disposal wells

Disposal wells carry a risk beyond cost. Injecting large volumes of produced water underground has been linked to earthquakes in parts of Texas and Oklahoma, and regulators have restricted injection volumes in parts of the Permian because of it. If your town sits in one of those restricted areas, that’s the reason. This water was being pumped underground near you until regulators stepped in.

Recycling is the cheaper option, as the figures above show, but treatment capacity hasn’t caught up to how much water the Permian produces. Every barrel reused on the next well is a barrel of fresh water that well doesn’t need to draw from a stressed basin. Until recycling scales further, produced water keeps going into the same disposal wells that caused the restrictions.

OPEC is the group of oil-exporting countries, most of them in the Middle East, whose members now pump about 33% of the world’s crude oil, down from a peak near 50% as producers outside the group grew. That smaller share still moves the price at your pump, though nowhere near as much as it once did.

How much power OPEC has left

A wider group called OPEC+ adds Russia and several other oil-producing countries to OPEC’s own membership, and the two coordinate production changes together. OPEC’s members still hold about 72% of the world’s proved oil reserves, as of the start of 2021, a cushion big enough that a war or blockade near the Gulf still shows up at your gas station within days.

The United Arab Emirates gave the clearest sign of that shrinking grip when it left OPEC entirely, announced around April 29, 2026, after a dispute over how much oil it was allowed to pump. OPEC+ met without the UAE for the first time on May 3, 2026 and approved a modest output increase anyway.

That fit a pattern from the rest of the year. OPEC+ spent 2026 unwinding an earlier round of voluntary production cuts, and a further 188,000-barrel-a-day increase, approved for September, completed the group’s planned reversal of the roughly 3.5 million barrels a day in cuts it had announced back in 2023. Even so, many OPEC+ members still can’t pump up to their new, higher quotas because of technical and operating limits on their fields, World Oil reported.

What it means at the pump

Gasoline tracks crude with a lag, and the 2026 Hormuz spike hit your tank fast. US retail gasoline reached $3.99 a gallon in late March 2026, and diesel reached $5.40 a gallon the same week, as Brent traded near its high for the quarter. By September 2026, gasoline had eased back to around $3.98 a gallon nationally, AAA reported.

The math behind that connection is simple. A barrel holds 42 US gallons, so a $118 barrel puts about $2.81 of crude in every gallon that fills your tank, before refining and taxes add the rest.

Where oil prices stood in September 2026

Line up the annual averages and the swings look calmer, even if they aren’t. Brent averaged $81 a barrel in 2024 and $69 in 2025, before the 2026 shock pushed the full-year average back up toward a projected $91. EIA’s own forecast has that easing again, to $74 to $77 a barrel by the second quarter of 2027. Brent was still trading around $107 a barrel on September 28, 2026, above where EIA expects it to settle.

The Hormuz disruption also pulled Brent and WTI apart. Brent is the international oil benchmark and WTI is the US benchmark, and the two normally trade within a few dollars of each other. The spread between them widened to $25 a barrel at its peak on March 31, 2026, and US refiners running mostly on WTI-priced crude felt that gap before it ever reached your tank.

Why oil prices swing this hard

Oil hit a record $145.31 a barrel on July 3, 2008, still the highest a barrel of oil has ever fetched. Oil sold for around $105 a barrel in mid-2014. It fell to under $30 by February 2016, a decline of roughly 70% to 75%.

A “swing producer” is a country with enough spare capacity to cut output when prices sag and pump more when they run hot, holding the price somewhere in the middle, and for decades that role belonged to Saudi Arabia. It broke from that habit during the 2014 to 2016 crash, defending its market share instead of the price as US shale output rose, a shift energy lawyer Elias Hinckley wrote about on this site in 2014.

Prices cratered again in 2020, further than before, as the pandemic shut down travel and industry and OPEC+ answered with a deep production cut. Eleven days later, on April 20, 2020, the WTI spot price fell to negative $36.98 a barrel, the first time in history a barrel of oil cost less than nothing.

Prices spiked again in 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine and the EU moved to sanction Russian oil, with Brent crude trading over $120 a barrel. The latest spike came in early 2026, when a Middle East war closed most shipping through the Strait of Hormuz starting February 28, 2026, and Brent crude moved from $61 a barrel to $118 within the quarter, crossing $100 a barrel on March 12 on its way there.

How the US shale boom changed the balance of power

Non-OPEC supply is the other half of this story. The United States pumped a record 13.6 million barrels of crude oil a day in 2025, up from the prior record of 13.2 million barrels a day set in 2024 and about 40% more than Russia or Saudi Arabia individually pumped that same year. Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s largest producer, pumped 9.6 million barrels a day in 2025, up from 9.2 million the year before.

Horizontal drilling turns the well sideways once it hits the shale layer, and pressurized water and sand crack that rock open so the oil trapped inside can flow into the pipe. Oil pulled up that way is part of why gassing up in Ohio or Texas doesn’t depend on OPEC’s members the way it did before the shale era.

Fracking and horizontal drilling are the techniques behind the shale boom that pushed US output past 13 million barrels a day, explained in full on that page. Canada’s oil sands grew alongside it, a separate non-OPEC story covered in what happened to Keystone XL and Canada’s oil sands.

Why the peak oil debate moved from supply to demand

Twenty years ago, the peak oil fear was that the world would run out of crude to pump. The growth in US shale production described above helped end that argument. The live debate now is about how long demand keeps growing.

The International Energy Agency dropped its “peak oil demand by 2030” call from the base case in its 2025 World Energy Outlook, Forbes reported. Forecasters no longer debate when demand stops climbing. The disagreement now is how high it climbs before that happens.

Source: Forbes (David Blackmon), citing the IEA’s 2025 World Energy Outlook, OPEC’s World Oil Outlook and ExxonMobil, read 2026-09-25.

OPEC’s own number sits about 10 million barrels a day above IEA’s new base case, and both sit well above ExxonMobil’s. You’d feel that gap at your corner gas station too, whichever forecast turns out right. If OPEC’s forecast holds, stations keep selling growing volumes of gasoline through 2050. If IEA is closer to right, demand starts fading well before then.

OPEC is holding output steady while forecasters split on demand

OPEC+ delegates told Bloomberg they expect to hold production quotas steady for the rest of 2026 now that the September increase is done, though the group said that could change with market conditions. That’s the easy half of the decision.

The harder half is picking a demand forecast to plan around, and OPEC has already picked its own. The group’s 123 million barrels a day by 2050 outlook comes from an organization that needs the world still buying its oil decades from now.

TC Energy killed the Keystone XL pipeline on June 9, 2021, ending a line built to carry 830,000 barrels of oil sands crude a day to the Gulf Coast. Oil sands production kept climbing anyway. Alberta pumped 3.4 million barrels of raw bitumen a day in 2023, and a different pipeline, Trans Mountain, nearly tripled export capacity out of Alberta when it opened in May 2024.

If you’re wondering whether Keystone XL itself is coming back, a similarly shaped project already ran through its own shipper open season in 2026, under a different company’s name.

Is Keystone XL coming back

South Bow now runs what’s left of the old Keystone system. It’s the company TC Energy spun its liquids-pipeline business off into on October 1, 2024, and it owns the Keystone Pipeline System, which has moved more than 3.9 billion barrels of crude since operations began in 2010. That’s crude the cancelled Keystone XL pipeline never got a chance to carry.

What’s proposed now is a South Bow project called the Prairie Connector, a new line from Hardisty, Alberta to Cushing, Oklahoma and on to the Gulf Coast. South Bow ran an open season for the line that closed March 30, 2026, offering shippers about 450,000 barrels a day of new capacity, a volume analysts told OilPrice.com could raise Canada’s crude exports by roughly 12 percent. A separate US project, the Bridger Pipeline Expansion, would run from Montana to Wyoming to connect on the American side. If you live in that part of Montana, it’s the same state Keystone XL needed permits to cross the first time.

Put the pipelines that matter to this story side by side.

Source: South Bow and Trans Mountain Corporation, plus OilPrice.com.

How big are Canada’s oil sands now

Alberta’s oil sands produced 3.4 million barrels of raw bitumen a day in 2023, and that province alone accounted for 84 percent of Canada’s total crude oil production that year. Oil sands make up more than three-quarters of Alberta’s own 4.3 million barrels a day of total crude output.

That bitumen looks and pours like cold molasses at room temperature, Canada’s energy regulator says, too thick to move through a pipeline until it’s heated or diluted with lighter hydrocarbons. Producers either extract it from open pits or melt it loose underground with injected steam.

Alberta’s total crude output grew from 2.8 million barrels a day in 2013 to 4.3 million in 2023, climbing through the entire Keystone XL fight and every year since it died. Output climbed through that fight, not because of it. Some of that growth probably reaches your gas tank already if you buy gasoline in the Midwest. The existing Keystone Pipeline and Enbridge’s Express Pipeline both carry Alberta crude to refining markets in the US Midwest and the Gulf Coast, Canada’s energy regulator reports.

The Trans Mountain expansion changed the math

Trans Mountain turned out to be the pipeline that gave oil sands crude more room to move. The expanded line began commercial service on May 1, 2024, taking capacity out of Alberta from about 300,000 to 890,000 barrels a day. That gave producers a route to the coast that Keystone XL, designed to reach Gulf Coast refineries, never offered. That extra oil moves out through the Westridge Marine Terminal in Burnaby, British Columbia, where Trans Mountain loads the tankers you’d see in the harbor if you live nearby.

The project’s cost estimate climbed for more than a decade before it opened. Trans Mountain Corporation puts the total at about C$30.9 billion, or roughly US$21.9 billion at an exchange rate of about 1.41 Canadian dollars per US dollar.

Was oil sands crude worse for the climate

The pipeline fight centered on whether oil sands crude is dirtier than the barrels it would replace, and whether stopping one pipeline would keep that oil in the ground at all. The EPA’s initial review found tar sands crude emits about 17 percent more carbon than the average barrel it replaces, and the State Department later put the gap at 5 to 20 percent higher, depending on the barrel it’s measured against. If you fill up with gasoline refined from oil sands crude, it carries roughly that much more upstream carbon than gas made from an average barrel.

You can read the broader case for the underlying climate science in our look at the evidence for climate change, which covers the fundamentals behind claims like these.

The permitting fight that killed Keystone XL

TransCanada, now TC Energy, first proposed Keystone XL in June 2008, a line designed to run from Hardisty, Alberta through Montana and South Dakota to Steele City, Nebraska, then on to Gulf Coast refineries. It took seven years of review before the Obama administration rejected the cross-border permit on November 6, 2015, concluding the project wouldn’t serve the national interest.

Trump signed a memo reviving the project four days into his first term, on January 24, 2017, and his State Department issued the cross-border permit that March. Biden revoked the permit on his first day back in office, January 20, 2021, and less than five months later TC Energy said it was done and formally cancelled the project on June 9, 2021.

Farmers and ranchers along that Nebraska route fought the project for years because it crossed the Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies drinking water for millions of people and about 30 percent of US irrigation water. If your own water comes from a well over an aquifer like that, this is the fight that set the playbook for opposing a pipeline on the same grounds.

The permit Prairie Connector doesn’t have yet

South Bow’s open season for the Prairie Connector closed in March 2026, but the project still needs its own cross-border permit, since Keystone XL’s original permits lapsed when TC Energy cancelled the project in 2021. Trump has pledged easier permitting for the corridor, and Prime Minister Carney reportedly discussed the pipeline plan with him in October 2025. The Bridger Pipeline Expansion is moving in parallel on the US side of the border, and neither project ships a barrel until regulators in both countries sign off.

That permit decides whether more of it starts moving through the old Keystone corridor and toward gas tanks like yours. Until it clears, the corridor stays empty. Alberta’s oil sands crude keeps moving the way it already does, through the Keystone Pipeline System and Trans Mountain.

US oil and gas operations leak at least 13 million metric tons of methane a year, according to a five-year measurement series led by the Environmental Defense Fund. That’s 60% more than the EPA’s own estimate of 8 million tons. The bigger that gap, the weaker the argument that the gas heating your house or running your local power plant burns cleaner than coal. The EPA keeps one count, IEA and Carbon Mapper keep their own with different tools, and Washington keeps rewriting what producers owe for what leaks.

How much methane escapes from US oil and gas

The wells and pipelines built during the 2010s shale gas expansion are the infrastructure this whole question is about. A leak from a corroded valve or a loose pipe joint is invisible and mostly odorless. A leak like that shows up mainly on an infrared camera aimed at the equipment, the same kind of imaging behind EDF’s own aircraft measurements and Carbon Mapper’s satellites, described below. If a well pad or compressor station sits near your town, this is the kind of leak nobody standing next to it can see or smell.

The EPA keeps its own official count in the Greenhouse Gas Inventory. Its most recently finished edition covers data through 2022 and was published in April 2024, and a newer draft covering data through 2023 was already out for public comment as of the same reading. The government’s own number keeps moving as more data comes in.

Industry and environmental groups often talk past each other here because leak rate isn’t one fixed number. It’s conventionally measured against gross gas production, everything pulled out of the ground, a much bigger figure than what reaches a customer’s meter. That’s also why a leak rate quoted to reassure a customer like you can look a lot smaller than the one an aircraft or satellite finds upstream.

Atmospheric methane keeps climbing worldwide, not from oil and gas alone. NOAA’s monitoring network measured a global average of 1,939 parts per billion in May 2026, up from 1,933 parts per billion a year earlier.

The satellites and instruments trying to check that number

The International Energy Agency published its latest worldwide count, the Global Methane Tracker 2025, on May 7, 2025. Separate from any government inventory, a nonprofit called Carbon Mapper flies its own Tanager satellites and says its public tracker has logged more than 36,000 methane plumes worldwide, plus close to 7,800 carbon dioxide plumes in total. It works alongside the United Nations Environment Programme’s International Methane Emissions Observatory, which targets the same leaks on the ground.

Tools like these are what would catch a leak near your neighborhood long before a multi-year federal inventory counted it.

A dedicated methane-hunting satellite called MethaneSAT, built by the Environmental Defense Fund, launched in March 2024. It lost contact with ground control on June 20, 2025, and its operators said the satellite was likely not recoverable the following month. Satellite monitoring of individual leaks now runs mostly through the projects still flying, Carbon Mapper included.

Why a 20-year leak looks worse than a 100-year one

The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, published in 2021, measured methane’s warming power against carbon dioxide’s over two different time frames.

Over 20 years, a ton of fossil methane, the kind that comes from wells and pipelines, traps about 83 times as much heat as a ton of carbon dioxide. Over 100 years, the same ton of fossil methane traps about 30 times as much.

Non-fossil methane, the kind that doesn’t come from drilling, traps less heat on both counts. Over 20 years it traps about 80 times as much as carbon dioxide. Over 100 years that falls to about 27 times as much, the same IPCC dataset shows.

Source: IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Chapter 7 (2021).

Which time frame you pick decides which fuel looks cleaner for the exact same leak. Judge a leak at a well near you on the 20-year number and gas barely beats coal, but judge that same leak on the 100-year number instead and gas looks a lot cleaner. The physics doesn’t change. Only the clock does.

Does gas still beat coal on climate

If you’ve heard natural gas pitched to you as a bridge away from coal, the math above is what that pitch rests on. On the 100-year clock, a leak costs less, and gas keeps its case as the cleaner fuel. On the 20-year clock, the same leak costs close to three times as much, and the bridge gets a lot shakier.

It’s also the case behind the decline of coal as a power source, one that leans on gas burning cleaner. The US has more riding on that answer than most countries, given how much of its power and how many of its jobs still run on oil and gas. Nobody in this fight, the EPA included, agrees on the exact number, and that argument goes back years. A 2011 investigation found EPA’s own leak estimates at the time were data the agency itself had called flawed.

What Washington’s methane rules require now

Federal policy on methane from oil and gas has swung twice in about a year. The EPA finalized a fee on excess emissions, the Waste Emissions Charge required under the Inflation Reduction Act, on November 12, 2024. That fee would have applied to leaks like the ones in the gas reaching your stove or furnace. Congress repealed it under the Congressional Review Act within four months, and President Trump signed that repeal on March 14, 2025.

The agency’s separate emissions standards for oil and gas equipment, known as OOOOb and OOOOc, went through a reversal of their own. The EPA announced it would reconsider the Biden-era rule on March 12, 2025, then finalized narrower technical changes to two parts of it on April 4, 2026. A separate deadline meant to phase out routine flaring at new wells was set for May 7, 2026, but the EPA clarified on May 1, 2026 that flaring is still allowed in limited circumstances.

Read together, the fee that would have made leaking expensive is gone, and the equipment rule survived in a narrower form than regulators originally finalized. Producers now carry less federal cost for their own methane, and the standard that is supposed to control it is still being rewritten.

What’s left to check this number now that MethaneSAT is gone

MethaneSAT, the satellite EDF built to check the leak number independently, has been gone since the summer of 2025. The main satellite project still flying is Carbon Mapper, whose Tanager satellites have logged more than 36,000 methane plumes worldwide alongside the United Nations Environment Programme’s International Methane Emissions Observatory.

On the regulatory side, the EPA’s broader reconsideration of the equipment rule still hasn’t finished working through the federal rulemaking process, so even the government’s own standard keeps moving under it. Nobody working on this number, in government or out, has closed the gap between 8 million tons and 13 million tons. For now, EDF’s aircraft and whatever satellites are still flying, Carbon Mapper included, are the only real check on that gap.