The energy economy in the United States has been transformed over the last 15 to 20 years, reducing reliance on some traditional fuel sources while bringing others to the forefront.
The main factors driving this shift have been the increased use of natural gas and renewable energy. The emergence of fracking has reduced the costs of natural gas extraction and led to a boom in domestic production over the past couple of decades. Simultaneously, new innovations in renewable energy sources like solar and wind power have reduced costs and made these alternatives more viable at scale. With the adoption of natural gas and renewables, production and consumption of formerly predominant sources like oil and coal have leveled off or declined.
This transition has also shifted the U.S. political economy around energy. Nationally, political figures have called for U.S. energy independence from imported foreign fuel resources for years, hoping to reduce reliance on other nations in the event of geopolitical conflicts. Because of the U.S.’s increased production of domestic energy sources, the country has made rapid progress toward that goal in recent years.
In 2019, the United States was a net exporter of energy for the first time since 1957, meaning that it produced more energy than it consumed. With a sharp increase in production over the past twenty years, production has begun to catch up with consumption and exports with imports. The nation’s net imports of coal and coke, natural gas, and petroleum have all fallen below zero, leaving only crude oil as a major fuel import—and even imports in that category are showing a decline.
Within the U.S., states have different levels of production and consumption affecting their import and export levels as well. While some states—especially those who produce coal in large numbers—have suffered in the transition between fuels, others have dramatically increased their energy production. As a result, these states are now producing far more energy on a per capita basis than peer states are.
This is particularly true for two of the states at the front of the natural gas boom, Wyoming and North Dakota. These states lead the nation in both total energy production on a per capita basis, a function of both their high levels of production and their low populations.
Interestingly, Wyoming and North Dakota are among the nation’s leaders in per capita energy consumption levels as well. One of the reasons is that extracting and refining fuel is itself an energy-intensive process—which is why some of the other leading states for energy consumption per capita are also major fuel producers, like Alaska and Louisiana.
Despite their high consumption levels, leading states Wyoming and North Dakota nonetheless have the highest net energy exports per capita, followed by other major energy producers like West Virginia, New Mexico, and Alaska. To find these locations, researchers at Commodity.com used data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Electric Power Annual Report and ranked states based on their net energy exports per capita—calculated as the difference between per capita production and consumption.
Here are the states that export the most energy.
| State | Rank | Net energy exports per capita (million Btu) | Total energy production per capita (million Btu) | Total energy consumption per capita (million Btu) | Net energy exports (trillion Btu) | Total energy production (trillion Btu) | Total energy consumption (trillion Btu)
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wyoming | 1 | 12,368.3 | 13,335.4 | 967.1 | 7,158.3 | 7,718.0 | 559.7 |
| North Dakota | 2 | 4,677.5 | 5,549.4 | 871.9 | 3,564.6 | 4,229.0 | 664.4 |
| West Virginia | 3 | 2,200.0 | 2,661.6 | 461.6 | 3,942.7 | 4,770.0 | 827.3 |
| New Mexico | 4 | 1,301.0 | 1,636.8 | 335.8 | 2,727.9 | 3,432.0 | 704.1 |
| Alaska | 5 | 1,099.3 | 1,928.8 | 829.5 | 804.2 | 1,411.0 | 606.8 |
| Oklahoma | 6 | 800.4 | 1,233.5 | 433.1 | 3,167.2 | 4,881.0 | 1,713.8 |
| Montana | 7 | 522.5 | 932.8 | 410.3 | 558.5 | 997.0 | 438.5 |
| Pennsylvania | 8 | 392.5 | 702.0 | 309.5 | 5,024.8 | 8,987.0 | 3,962.2 |
| Colorado | 9 | 370.0 | 635.9 | 265.9 | 2,130.8 | 3,662.0 | 1,531.2 |
| Texas | 10 | 206.2 | 704.3 | 498.1 | 5,978.2 | 20,421.0 | 14,442.8 |
| United States* | – | 2.7 | 307.8 | 305.2 | 873.0 | 101,038.0 | 100,165.0 |
For more information, a detailed methodology, and complete results, you can find the original report on Commodity.com’s website: https://commodity.com/blog/
