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1 Dataset of 2019-2023 U.S. National-Level Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Sector Ben Young, ERG, *ben.youn[email protected]om Catherine Birney, ERG Yash Srivastava, ERG Wesley W. Ingwersen, Stanford University Sustainable Solutions Lab Keywords environmental-economic model, sector attribution model, FLOWSA, GHG inventory Summary The 2019-2023 National-Level Greenhouse Gas Emission Totals by Industry dataset (Young et al. 2025) contains ~23 thousand records of GHGs directly emitted in the U.S. by economic sectors and households across two Excel files, one for each level of industry detail. The aggregate level provides data for all U.S. industries and households in 118 categories. The detail provides data for all U.S. industries and households in 527 categories. Sectors are defined using the codes from the 2017 version of the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). The 2025 version of the U.S. GHG Inventory (GHGI) is the primary source for the emissions quantities in the dataset (U.S. EPA 2025). The 17 unique GHG chemicals or groups are reported using the nomenclature from the Federal LCA Commons Elementary Flow List v1.3.2 (Edelen et al. 2019), where all individual GHGs present in the GHGI are reported. The dataset uses the Flow-By-Sector collapsed format (Birney et al. 2022). Emissions of each GHG are reported in kilograms (kg) per year, except for groups of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and perfluorohydrocarbons (PFCs) where the original data were only available in CO2-equivalents (CO2e). Even more detailed versions of the Excel datasets are available in Apache parquet files, where each record provides a total for a given GHG, sector, year, location, and data source and provides all the fields in the Flow-By-Sector collapsed format. The Excel versions of the data provide records aggregated at the level of GHG, sector, and year. The Excel versions also provide supporting definitions of sector codes. The geographic scope of the emission totals include the U.S. States and District of Columbia. The code used to generate the datasets is available in v2.1.0 of the FLOWSA tool. These data are an update to 2012-2022 National-Level Greenhouse Gas Emission Totals by Industry (Young and Ingwersen 2024). Data for 2023 are added and data for 2019-2022 are updated. Data for years prior to 2019 are not included in this release. Please see the
2 related publication for more background information and methodological detail (Young, Birney, and Ingwersen 2024), along with the release notes below. Value of the Data • Tracking greenhouse gas emissions is important for governments and organizations seeking to estimate progress in reducing the drivers of emissions. • While the U.S. GHG Inventory (GHGI) is an essential resource for understanding the total annual GHG emissions attributable to the U.S., it does not fully attribute these emissions to economic sectors at a highly detailed resolution, which is the purpose of the modeling and resulting datasets described here. • Researchers, looking to assess U.S. greenhouse gas emission trends associated with sector/industry activities will find these data valuable. • The data can be used in sectorand national-scale models of GHG emissions associated with economic activity including environmentally-extended input-output models, life cycle assessment models, or to produce environmental-economic accounts for GHGs for the U.S. Methodological Updates The primary methodological update related to data preparation was that the GHGI data were not provided in zipped csv files but only available through the PDF report. Therefore the data were extracted from the PDF report file using the PDF import feature built into Microsoft Excel and any import errors were then manually corrected. These data were stored as a zipped archive of comma separated value (csv) files in a format identical to what were used in previous years. The FLOWSA software was updated from v2.0.3 to v2.1.0 but this update did not result in any known changes to the results. The primary methodological update in attribution was a reversion to the reference BEA Detail Make and Use tables for 2017 instead of using imputed Make and Use tables for more recent years, due to a lack of integrity of the effect of the imputed tables on the attribution. Table 1 shows the data years used for attribution sources when necessary for the new models. Columns headers are for the model years.
3 Table 1: Data Years for Allocation Sources By Model and Year Allocation Source 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 EIA_MECS_Energy 2018 2018 2018 2018 2018 USDA_CoA_Cropland 2017 2017 2022 2022 2022 USDA_CoA_Cropland_NAICS 2017 2017 2022 2022 2022 BEA_Detail_Make 2017 2017 2017 2017 2017 BEA_Detail_Use 2017 2017 2017 2017 2017 USGS_MYB_Lead 2019 2020 2020 2020 2020 Validation The primary validation check used is a comparison check against the original source of GHG emissions totals (the GHG inventory). This comparison is performed by aggregating the totals by industry and gas back to totals by gas and checking those against the totals reported in the original source. Table 2 presents the results of the validation check against the GHGI totals by gas or groups of minor gas for each year of the model as well as in total CO2-equivalents (CO2e), where 1 would be a perfect correspondence. Table 2: Relative difference between sum of GHG or groups between the national detail model (m2) and GHGI GHG 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 Carbon dioxide 1.004 1.004 1.005 1.000 1.000 HFCs 1.005 1.004 1.003 1.003 1.005 Methane 0.997 0.997 0.997 0.997 0.997 Nitrogen trifluoride 0.967 1.019 0.999 0.999 1.007 Nitrous oxide 0.996 0.996 0.997 0.995 0.996 PFCs 0.862 0.905 0.916 0.893 0.839 Sulfur hexafluoride 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.014 1.000 Total CO2e 1.002 1.003 1.003 0.999 0.999 Changes from the Previous Release The previous dataset (Young and Ingwersen 2024) also includes GHG totals at the national level for aggregate and detailed industries for years 2019-2022. A series of comparison tables are provided as a supplementary Excel file that show the change in GHG totals by detailed industry. For each year there is one comparison table on GHG totals and another on GHG by sector totals. In each table a national_new field shows totals for the new
4 dataset and the national_old field shows the old dataset totals. The comp_nat field is simply the national_new divided by the national_old value. Citation To reference this information, please cite the full dataset entry: Young, B., Birney, C., Srivastava, Y., & Ingwersen, W. (2025). Greenhouse Gas Emissions By Industry in the United States 2019-2023 (2025.1.0) [Data set]. Cornerstone Sustainability Data Initiative. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17208591 References Birney, Catherine, Ben Young, Mo Li, Melissa Conner, Jacob Specht, and Wesley Ingwersen. 2022. “FLOWSA: A Python Package Attributing Resource Use, Waste, Emissions, and Other Flows to Industries.” Applied Sciences 12: 5742. https://doi.org/10.3390/app12115742. Edelen, Ashley, Troy Hottle, Sarah Cashman, and Wesley Ingwersen. 2019. “The Federal LCA Commons Elementary Flow List: Background, Approach, Description and Recommendations for Use.” EPA/600/R-19/092. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. https://cfpub.epa.gov/si/si_public_record_report.cfm?dirEntryId=347251. U.S. EPA. 2025. “Inventory of u.s. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990-2023.” 430R-25-003. https://library.edf.org/AssetLink/145ky510ew61fk1tq5c2klp5kq5yp33j.pdf. Young, Ben, Catherine Birney, and Wesley W. Ingwersen. 2024. “Dataset of 2012-2020 U.S. Nationaland State-Level Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Sector.” Data in Brief 53: 110173. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2024.110173. Young, Ben, Catherine Birney, Yash Srivastava, and Wesley Ingwersen. 2025. “Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Industry in the United States 2019-2023.” v2025.1.0. Cornerstone Sustainability Data Initiative. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17208591. Young, Ben, and Wesley Ingwersen. 2024. “2012-2022 National-Level Greenhouse Gas Emission Totals by Industry.” data.gov. https://doi.org/10.23719/1531141.
