With Bobby Magill
With the US on the brink of winter home heating season, what fuel are you using to heat your home?
The answer to this question depends a lot on where you live, and it also affects your carbon footprint.
Credit: Climate Central
Nationally, natural gas heats most homes. But regionally, other fuels dominate.
About 48 percent of all homes in the U.S. use natural gas for heating, while electricity is used in 37 percent; US Census Bureau data projection. About 14% use other fuels.
The climate impacts of heating fuels could be significant, especially at a time when the electricity sector begins a long transition away from coal and toward natural gas, as the Obama administration develops policies aimed at reducing CO2 emissions from power plants.
Ongoing climate policy favors the use of natural gas to overtake coal as the dominant source of electricity in the US, but recent studies have shown that the climate benefits of switching from natural gas to coal for electricity generation are not have been proven.RELATEDModern wood burning for home heating in the Northeast
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Today, natural gas piped directly to homes is the dominant source of heating fuel in every region except the South, where more than 60 percent of households used electricity in 2013. The South is also the region with saw the biggest change away from coal and towards natural gas for electricity generation.
The Midwest sees the most use of natural gas for heating, with more than 65 percent of homes there using natural gas.
But the use of natural gas for heating is decreasing. Every region in the US except the Northeast shows a slight drop in favor of electricity, according to EIA report released on Thursday.
More people may be using electricity for heating instead of natural gas because they may be moving into newer homes that use electricity and use it more efficiently than older homes heated with electricity, according to the EIA.
In the Northeast, the opposite is happening, with the use of heating oil declining there in favor of natural gas. Heating oil is almost unheard of outside the Northeast, which accounts for about 80 percent of all U.S. heating oil use.
More than 30 percent of all households in the Northeast used heating oil in 2005. That number dropped to less than 25 percent in 2013. Heating oil stocks they have become tight in recent years, with several northeastern states, including New York, requiring heating oil to be marketed with lower sulfur levels.
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