The Top 20 Energy-Producing States

America produced more energy in 2023 and 2024 than any country ever has

The United States produced nearly 103 quadrillion Btu of energy in 2023, a 4 percent rise and a record at the time, then exceeded it again in 2024 (EIA, Today in Energy, 2024). Production outran consumption by 9 quadrillion Btu in 2023, the widest gap in records dating to 1949 (EIA). Crude oil output ran above 13 million barrels per day, a level no country had previously reached, and the United States stood as the world's largest producer of both oil and natural gas (EIA). Whatever one's view of the energy transition, the production record is not in dispute.

The scale is easy to underestimate. A quadrillion Btu, one quad, is roughly the annual energy content of 45 million tons of coal or 172 million barrels of crude. The United States now produces more than a hundred of those units a year, and it does so while remaining a net exporter, shipping the surplus abroad as crude, refined products, and liquefied natural gas (EIA). No single fact in this report is more settled than the raw production total, because it is a physical measurement compiled from company filings and state records, not a survey or an estimate of sentiment.

That output is intensely concentrated. Texas alone produced 27,104.7 trillion Btu in 2023, about 26 percent of the national total (EIA SEDS). The top four states, Texas, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, and West Virginia, produced roughly half of all American energy. EIA's own analysis has documented the top producing states steadily gaining market share for two decades as shale development rewarded specific geology (EIA SEDS; Natural Gas Intelligence). The map of American energy is not fifty states pulling evenly; it is a short list of states carrying the load, and the rest of the country buying what they produce.

Why the Btu is the only honest ruler

A ton of Wyoming coal, a barrel of Alaska crude, a cubic foot of Pennsylvania gas, and a megawatt-hour from Grand Coulee are physically different things. The only way to rank them on one ledger is to convert everything to the heat it can release, the British thermal unit. That is exactly what the State Energy Data System does for all 50 states, which is why it is the ruler here. No other federal dataset does that arithmetic uniformly across every fuel and every state, back to 1960 (EIA SEDS).

The choice has consequences that some readers will dislike. Measured in Btu, a hydropower state and a coal state are compared without regard to emissions. A megawatt-hour of nuclear electricity and a barrel of crude count by their energy content, not their jobs, their exports, or their politics. That is the point. When people argue about which states are energy powers, they usually mean different things, oil, or electricity, or clean power. SEDS answers only one question, cleanly: how much primary energy did each state physically produce. The scores in this table are that number, indexed to Texas at 100, and nothing else.

The limitation is real and worth stating plainly. Production is not the same as strategic weight. Louisiana ranks eighth on raw Btu but is arguably more important to the global energy system than its rank suggests, because its Gulf Coast terminals made the United States the world's largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (EIA). A production ranking undercounts refining, pipelines, and export capacity. Readers who want a map of energy power, not just energy tonnage, should hold that caveat in mind through the whole table.

The New Mexico surge is the story of the decade

No large state has moved faster. New Mexico's total production rose from 5,505 trillion Btu in 2021 to 7,651.8 in 2023, a 39 percent increase in two years, carrying it past Wyoming and West Virginia into third place (EIA SEDS). The engine is the Delaware portion of the Permian Basin, which made New Mexico the second-largest crude oil producer in the nation, behind only Texas, and pushed its natural gas output to a record 8.7 Bcf/d in 2023, up 12 percent in a single year (EIA, Today in Energy, 2024).

The political texture is worth recording without comment. The nation's fastest-growing oil state is governed by Democrats, and oil and gas revenue now funds a large share of its state budget, including a permanent fund for public education. The framework pays no attention to which party presides over a drilling boom. The meters do not either. A Btu produced under a Democratic governor and a Btu produced under a Republican one are the same Btu, and the ranking counts them the same way. If that produces discomfort for anyone's political priors, the discomfort belongs to the reader, not the data.

The gas states carry the record

The 2023 U.S. energy record was, above all, a natural gas record. Marketed gas production hit 113.1 Bcf/d, and just five states produced more than 70 percent of it: Texas at 31.6 Bcf/d, Pennsylvania at 20.9, Louisiana at 11.8, West Virginia at 8.9, and New Mexico at 8.7 (EIA, Today in Energy, 2024). Every one of those five sits in the top eight of this ranking, and four of them sit in the top five. Shale gas is the single largest reason the American energy map looks the way it does today.

The concentration is geological, not political. The Marcellus and Utica shales run under Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio; the Haynesville under Louisiana and East Texas; the Permian and Delaware under West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. A state either sits on top of one of these formations or it does not. Ohio is the clearest illustration: its natural gas production has risen more than tenfold since 2012 on Utica development, turning a state that once imported most of its gas into a top-ten producer (EIA). Geology moved, and Ohio's rank moved with it.

Texas and Pennsylvania alone produced 46 percent of the nation's marketed gas in 2023, one out of every two cubic feet from just two states (EIA, Today in Energy, 2024). Both increased output that year, Texas by about 5 percent and New Mexico by about 12 percent, setting state records even as prices sagged (EIA). That combination, record volume against soft prices, is the signature of shale: production kept rising because the wells were already drilled and the associated gas came up whether it was wanted or not. The ranking captures that supply-driven surge exactly, because it counts molecules produced, not dollars earned.

Coal is a smaller kingdom, and Wyoming still rules it

Coal has fallen by more than half from its 2008 national peak, but it has not vanished, and it remains concentrated in a way no other fuel matches (EIA). Wyoming mined roughly 41 percent of all U.S. coal in 2023, about 237 million short tons, more than the next several states combined, almost all of it low-sulfur Powder River Basin coal (EIA). West Virginia is second, Pennsylvania third, Illinois fourth, and Montana fifth; those five states accounted for about three-quarters of national coal production (EIA).

Wyoming's overall ranking, fifth at roughly 6,014 trillion Btu in 2022, is a reminder that a single dominant fuel can still put a small-population state near the top of the national table (EIA). Wyoming produces far more energy than it consumes and exports the surplus as coal, gas, and electricity to the rest of the country. Kentucky and Montana, ranked fifteenth and sixteenth, tell the quieter end of the same story: coal states that have slipped as the fuel declined but still produce enough to hold a top-20 seat. What SEDS records is not coal's future, which is contested, but its present output, which is not.

Fuel identity still defines the middle of the table

Below the shale giants, each state in the top 20 is essentially a fuel with borders. Illinois runs the largest nuclear fleet in the country, 11 reactors that supplied 54 percent of the state's electricity in 2023 (EIA state analysis, 2024). Washington is hydropower: it generated 25 percent of all U.S. conventional hydroelectricity in 2023, led by Grand Coulee, the highest-capacity power plant in the nation (EIA). California is the diversification outlier, leading the country in solar at nearly 69,000 GWh, more than double second-place Texas, and in geothermal at The Geysers and the Salton Sea, roughly 4,000 megawatts of combined capacity, while its crude oil output slowly declines (EIA).

Iowa is ethanol and wind, generating a higher share of its electricity from wind than any state, more than half in recent years (EIA). Arizona's Palo Verde is the largest single generating plant in America by annual output. Alabama runs Browns Ferry nuclear alongside the fifth-largest hydroelectric output in the country, about 4 percent of the U.S. total in 2023 (EIA). Alaska is almost purely North Slope crude, roughly 492,000 barrels per day in 2023, with much of the associated gas reinjected rather than sold (EIA). These identities are why a common unit matters: only in Btu can a nuclear state, a hydropower state, a solar state, and an oil state be laid on the same table and compared without an argument about which fuel counts.

The renewables picture inside this table is not what political shorthand suggests. Texas, the oil and gas leader, was also the runaway leader in wind generation at 119,836 GWh in 2023, nearly three times the second-place wind state, and second in solar (EIA). The same state tops fossil and wind at once. California leads solar and geothermal but ranks eleventh overall because its total tonnage of primary energy is modest next to the shale states. A clean-energy leader and a fossil-fuel leader can be the same state, or the ranking can separate them by twenty places, and only a Btu ledger shows both facts at the same time.

What the ranking ignores, on purpose

This table measures production, not virtue, and not consumption. California, a perennial target in energy politics, still ranks eleventh as a producer on the strength of oil, geothermal, and solar, even as its total output declines. Louisiana ranks eighth on production but matters far more than that to the global system through its LNG terminals (EIA). A production ranking undercounts refining, transport, and export infrastructure, and readers should hold that limitation through every line of the table.

Growth also matters as much as level. The 2021 to 2023 SEDS comparison shows the pattern plainly: New Mexico up 39 percent, Texas up roughly 14 percent from 23,844 to 27,104.7 trillion Btu, while legacy coal states held flat or declined as national coal production kept falling (EIA SEDS, 2021 and 2023). The states gaining share are the ones sitting on shale oil and gas; the states losing it are the ones built on coal. That is the single clearest trend in the modern SEDS record, and it is the reason the next edition of this table will move again.

The bottom of a very tall table

The gap between top and bottom of this ranking is the real headline. Texas at 27,104.7 trillion Btu produces more than the bottom sixteen states on this list combined, and roughly six times more than fifth-place Wyoming (EIA SEDS, 2023). Arizona, ranked twentieth, produces a small fraction of what Texas does, yet still lands in the national top 20, because energy production is that lopsided across the country.

Thirty states produce far less than the twenty listed here. Most of the Northeast and much of the Southeast are net energy consumers that buy the surplus these twenty states generate. The American energy system is, in effect, a handful of producer states supplying everyone else, connected by pipelines, transmission lines, rail, and tankers. This ranking measures only the first link in that chain, the physical production, but that link is where the concentration is starkest, and where the SEDS meter reads cleanest.

The concentration has a second-order effect worth naming. Because a small number of producer states carry the national total, national energy statistics move when a few state economies move. The 2023 record was driven overwhelmingly by growth in Texas, New Mexico, and the Appalachian gas states; a slowdown in the Permian would show up in the national number the way few other states could cause. That is why the SEDS state table is not just a curiosity but the granular version of the national story. The country's energy output is the sum of these twenty ledgers, weighted heavily toward the top of the list, and the ranking is simply that sum, decomposed and ordered by the same ruler for every state.