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Visualizing U.S. Energy Consumption in One Chart

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Visualizing U.S. Energy Consumption in One Chart

Visualizing U.S. Energy Consumption in One Chart

Every year, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a federal research facility funded by the Department of Energy and UC Berkeley, puts out a fascinating Sankey diagram that shows the fate of all energy that gets generated and consumed in the United States in a given year.

Today’s visualization is the summary of energy consumption for 2017, but you can see previous years going all the way back to 2010 on their website.

Dealing in Quads

The first thing you’ll notice about this Sankey is that it uses an unfamiliar unit of measurement: the quad.

Each quad is equal to a quadrillion BTUs, and it’s roughly comparable to the following:

  • 8,007,000,000 gallons (US) of gasoline
  • 293,071,000,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh)
  • 36,000,000 tonnes of coal
  • 970,434,000,000 cubic feet of natural gas
  • 25,200,000 tonnes of oil
  • 252,000,000 tonnes of TNT
  • 13.3 tonnes of uranium-235

Put another way, a quad is a massive unit that only is useful in measuring something like national energy consumption – and in this case, the total amount of energy used by the country was 97.7 quadrillion BTUs.

Energy Wasted

On the diagram, one thing that is immediately noticeable is that a whopping 68% of all energy is actually rejected energy, or energy that gets wasted through various inefficiencies.

It’s quite eye-opening to look at this data sorted by sector:

SectorEnd-Use EfficiencyRejected Energy (Quads)
Residential65%3.75
Commercial65%3.15
Industrial49%12.9
Transportation21%22.2

The transportation sector used 28.1 quads of energy in 2017, about 28.8% of the total consumption. However, it wasted 22.2 quads of that energy with its poor efficiency rate, which made for more rejected energy than the other three sectors combined.

This wastage and inefficiency in the transportation sector provides an interesting lens from which to view the green energy revolution, and it also helps explain the vision that Elon Musk has for the future of Tesla.

A Ways to Go

The last time we posted a version of this visualization was for the 2015 edition of the diagram, and we noted that renewables had a ways to go as a factor in the whole energy mix.

Here are how things have changed over the last two years:

Energy2015 (Quads)2017 (Quads)2-yr change
Petroleum35.436.22.3%
Natural Gas28.328.0-1.1%
Coal15.714.0-10.8%
Nuclear8.348.421.0%
Biomass4.724.914.0%
Hydro2.392.7715.9%
Wind1.822.3529.1%
Solar0.5320.77545.7%
Geothermal0.2240.211-5.8%

As you can see, solar and wind consumption are jumping considerably – but in absolute terms, our note from two years ago still remains true.

To make the desired impact, renewable energy still has a ways to go.

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Energy

How Much Does the U.S. Depend on Russian Uranium?

Currently, Russia is the largest foreign supplier of nuclear power fuel to the U.S.

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Voronoi graphic visualizing U.S. reliance on Russian uranium

How Much Does the U.S. Depend on Russian Uranium?

This was originally posted on Elements. Sign up to the free mailing list to get beautiful visualizations on natural resource megatrends in your email.

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a ban on imports of Russian uranium. The bill must pass the Senate before becoming law.

In this graphic, we visualize how much the U.S. relies on Russian uranium, based on data from the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA).

U.S. Suppliers of Enriched Uranium

After Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russian-produced oil and gas—yet Russian-enriched uranium is still being imported.

Currently, Russia is the largest foreign supplier of nuclear power fuel to the United States. In 2022, Russia supplied almost a quarter of the enriched uranium used to fuel America’s fleet of more than 90 commercial reactors.

Country of enrichment serviceSWU%
🇺🇸 United States3,87627.34%
🇷🇺 Russia3,40924.04%
🇩🇪 Germany1,76312.40%
🇬🇧 United Kingdom1,59311.23%
🇳🇱 Netherlands1,3039.20%
Other2,23215.79%
Total14,176100%

SWU stands for “Separative Work Unit” in the uranium industry. It is a measure of the amount of work required to separate isotopes of uranium during the enrichment process. Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration

Most of the remaining uranium is imported from European countries, while another portion is produced by a British-Dutch-German consortium operating in the United States called Urenco.

Similarly, nearly a dozen countries around the world depend on Russia for more than half of their enriched uranium—and many of them are NATO-allied members and allies of Ukraine.

In 2023 alone, the U.S. nuclear industry paid over $800 million to Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy corporation, Rosatom, and its fuel subsidiaries.

It is important to note that 19% of electricity in the U.S. is powered by nuclear plants.

The dependency on Russian fuels dates back to the 1990s when the United States turned away from its own enrichment capabilities in favor of using down-blended stocks of Soviet-era weapons-grade uranium.

As part of the new uranium-ban bill, the Biden administration plans to allocate $2.2 billion for the expansion of uranium enrichment facilities in the United States.

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