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About Carbon Dioxide Emissions In The USA [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-09-16

We are looking at carbon dioxide emissions in the USA over the past few decades to see the impact of burning different forms of fossil fuels. This article is rough since I don’t have much time to devote to editing so I am a one draft wonder today. All of the data comes from the Energy Information Administration Total Energy Monthly Data, environment section. I am ignoring current politics for my own sanity.

There seems to be a lot of misinformation out in the world so lets dig into the facts. The first chart shows emissions by fuel type in million metric tonnes (there are 2,200 pounds per metric tonne) by year. The top line shows that emissions peaked in 2007 at just over 6,000 million tonnes and have been going down to 4,800 million tonnes in 2024. This amount of reduction is rather good even compared to other countries in Europe.

The three lines below show that almost all of the reduction is due to reductions in burning coal. Below the chart is a table with the 2024 emissions.

So what happens to emissions if we replace the coal burning with natural gas? Here is an estimate and the total emissions does drop nicely. Of course if all of the coal burning to generate electricity is replaced with wind+solar then the total amount reduces to about 4,100 million metric tonnes. With the total emissions from coal at about 100 million metric tonnes from industrial usage there are better targets for our reduction efforts.

I think that most people have a good feel for the major uses of natural gas — space heating, water heating, cooking, and generating electricity. The emissions from burning natural gas to generate electricity is 735 million metric tonnes (out of 1,787 total) in 2024. There are well defined transition paths (heat pumps, electric cooking, and wind+solar) for all four activities so we can move on to petroleum.

Each barrel of crude oil gets separated into many components. The EIA tracks the emissions components and the 2024 numbers are below. I usually break out the 90% and group the remainder into “other” and the next chart show that simplified result.

Motor gasoline is just the gasoline sold at pumps and I don’t know what non-motor gasoline would be. Distillate fuel oil is burned for heat as heating fuel and also made into diesel fuel. If you look at diesel fuel you are looking at distillate fuel oil. The other type is residual fuel oil and is the stuff you hear about being burned in ships engines and is very, very polluting. Jet fuel is very close to kerosene and hydrocarbon gas liquid are mostly LPG fuel and propane.

The three categories make up 90% of emissions from petroleum products. Gasoline is by far the heavy emitter and fuel oil is second. This clearly shows that emissions reductions means transitioning from gasoline and diesel to electric vehicles powered by wind+solar. Anything burned for heat is replaced with heat pumps and everything else will keep the chemists busy finding replacements or refining processes to satisfy demand (such as lubricating oils, waxes, tars, etc).

The one fuel component left to replace is jet fuel. It will be very difficult to replace those magnificent jet engines with anything battery powered so a bio-fuel replacement is required in my opinion. If we replace gasoline with electricity there will be a lot of ethanol capacity at idle. I looked at the numbers once and the amount of ethanol produced is rather close to the amount of jet fuel consumed. Perhaps the ethanol can be mixed with jet fuel and then very little change is required to the planes. I know that ethanol is very heavily debated but it is an improvement over petroleum, the industry already exists, and the engines should burn it just fine (with some performance change of course). Just a thought about a difficult problem.

After mostly eliminating coal it will be much harder work bringing emissions down but there are paths to get there. I hope this was mostly readable and, as always, thank you for your time and attention.

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