GHG Emissions by Industry

How EPA classifies industry sectors

The EPA's Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP) groups facilities into industry sectors based on the activity that drives emissions, not the parent company's primary business. A facility owned by a diversified industrial conglomerate may therefore appear in "Electricity Generation" if its boilers feed a power-generation unit, even if the parent reports as a chemical manufacturer. This sector-level view captures where emissions physically originate, which is the framing most useful for regulatory analysis, supply-chain accounting, and state-level inventory reconciliation.

Sector totals on this page sum the latest reported year for every covered facility - typically the most recent calendar year with finalized GHGRP submissions. Facilities below the federal reporting threshold (25,000 metric tons CO2e per year) are excluded by design; sector totals therefore represent the "large emitter" footprint, not the full economy-wide envelope. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency publishes a separate national Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks that fills in smaller sources, agriculture, transportation, and land-use change.

What the rankings tell you

Electricity generation is consistently the largest reported sector, followed by petroleum & natural gas systems, minerals (cement and lime), and chemicals. Together these four sectors account for the majority of reported emissions in any given year. The "avg per facility" column is a useful counterweight to absolute totals: a sector with fewer but larger facilities (e.g., refining) will rank differently on per-facility intensity than on aggregate tonnage. We surface both so you can frame each industry on the dimension most relevant to your question.

Year-over-year movement is driven by a mix of fuel switching (coal-to-gas in power generation), demand changes (cement output tracks construction cycles), efficiency programs (refinery flare reduction), and reporting boundary adjustments. We retain every reporting year so longitudinal comparisons are visible on each sector's detail page rather than collapsed into a single headline number. The bar widths on this index reflect the most recent year only.

Using this data

Click any sector to see its facility-level breakdown, top reporting companies, and per-state distribution. Each detail page links back to the underlying EPA FLIGHT records so you can verify the raw filings. Sector classifications follow EPA's subpart taxonomy (Subpart D for electricity, Subpart W for petroleum and natural gas, etc.) rather than NAICS economic codes, the two systems overlap but are not identical, and we note the cross-reference on each sector page where material.

For multi-facility companies, the company profile pages aggregate sector mix across all reporting locations, useful when a parent operates in two or three sectors simultaneously. For state-level context, the state pages show how each sector contributes to that state's reported total. These three views (industry, company, state) form the basic navigation grid; the rankings pages cut across them by metric (largest emitters, biggest reducers, lowest-intensity producers).