Natural Gas Production by State vs Consumption

Texas marketed 12.02 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas in 2024, more than any other state, but Pennsylvania has the larger surplus over its own use: 7.30 Tcf of dry gas against 1.92 Tcf consumed, a ratio of 3.80. Only 11 states and the federal offshore Gulf produced more than they used.

Which state ranks where depends on the count. Alaska is fifth among the states on gross withdrawals, 3.55 Tcf, and 11th on marketed production, 0.37 Tcf, because 3.17 Tcf of the gas that came out of its wells, 89% of the total, was injected back into oil reservoirs. Texas loses 22% between gross withdrawals and dry gas, and 1.97 of the 2.86 Tcf difference is natural gas liquids pulled out at processing plants.

Nationally the surplus is modest. Dry production of 37.72 Tcf ran 1.14 times the 33.06 Tcf consumed. Across the 52 areas the swings are much larger: the 12 surplus areas add up to 23.01 Tcf and the 40 deficit areas to 18.34 Tcf of shortfall. The net of the two, 4.67 Tcf, is close to the 4.56 Tcf of net exports in the national balance sheet for the same year.

One well stream, three counts

EIA publishes three production totals for each state, and each removes something from the one before. EIA defines gross withdrawals as the full well-stream volume, including natural gas plant liquids and nonhydrocarbon gases but excluding lease condensate. Marketed production is gross withdrawals less gas used for repressuring, gas vented and flared, and nonhydrocarbon gases removed in treating, and EIA adds that it “includes all quantities of gas used in field and processing plant operations”. Dry production is marketed production less the extraction loss, the gas-equivalent volume of liquids such as ethane and propane taken out at plants. Dry gas is what enters the pipeline grid as consumer-grade gas.

The identities hold exactly. For the U.S., 45,867,761 less 3,855,413 repressured, 335,163 vented and flared and 293,292 of nonhydrocarbon gases leaves 41,383,893, 90.2% of the gross. EIA’s own “non-marketed” line for 2024, 4,483,867, matches the sum of those three deductions to within 1 MMcf. Taking 3,658,962 out for liquids leaves 37,724,931, or 82.2% of the gross.

The deductions fall unevenly. Repressuring dominates Alaska, where it takes 89% of gross withdrawals, and matters in Wyoming (123,928 MMcf) and Texas (549,580). Nonhydrocarbon gas removal is a Wyoming and Texas story: Wyoming removed 107,101 MMcf, 8% of its gross, and Texas 186,191. Liquids are the largest single step in the big shale states: 1,965,509 MMcf in Texas, 305,494 in West Virginia, 270,381 in New Mexico and 237,343 in North Dakota, a bigger share of North Dakota’s marketed gas (20%) than of Texas’s (16%). The natural gas liquids guide follows those barrels after they leave the plant.

Pennsylvania and West Virginia show no repressuring, no vented and flared gas and no nonhydrocarbon removal, so their marketed production equals their gross withdrawals (7,422,303 and 3,417,995 MMcf). The tables carry zeros there, and the flaring by state guide explains why a zero for a large producer such as Pennsylvania should be read as not reported, since some states do not collect venting and flaring data. The gross figures used here are the same ones that guide divides by: Texas 12,918,987 MMcf, North Dakota 1,253,369, New Mexico 3,616,820.

Why dry gas is the fair match for consumption

The ratio most readers want is production divided by use, and it can be built on marketed or dry gas. On marketed gas the U.S. ratio is 1.25; on dry gas it is 1.14. The marketed version overstates a state’s supply, because 3.66 Tcf of the marketed volume leaves the gas stream as liquids before the remainder reaches a burner tip. Consumption, in contrast, already includes the lease and plant fuel that sits inside both production counts. Dry gas against consumption therefore compares like with like. Both ratios appear in the tables below, and they agree on which areas are in surplus: the same 12 areas pass on either basis.

Texas leads every count, and the order below it moves

The top four places are the same on all three 2024 counts: Texas, Pennsylvania, Louisiana and New Mexico. Five states, those four plus West Virginia, supplied 72.7% of the 41.38 Tcf of U.S. marketed gas, and Texas alone 29.0%. Below the leaders the sequence shifts. Alaska is fifth on gross and falls to 11th on marketed gas. Wyoming and North Dakota swap places between marketed gas (North Dakota 9th) and dry gas (Wyoming 9th), because North Dakota loses 20% of its marketed volume to liquids and Wyoming only 5%.

Two orderings sit on thin margins and are worth stating precisely. On 2024 gross withdrawals Louisiana (3,617,321 MMcf) edges New Mexico (3,616,820) by 501 MMcf, a gap of 0.014%. The gap widens to 268,673 MMcf on dry gas, because far more of New Mexico’s gas is taken out as liquids (270,381 MMcf against 16,140). In 2025 the order flips on marketed production: New Mexico reported 4,130,971 MMcf against Louisiana’s 3,813,990, a lead of 316,981, so New Mexico is third in 2025 and fourth in 2024. A ranking quoted without a year and a count can be right and still contradict another one.

The offshore Gulf is the other source of mismatches. EIA lists federal waters as their own area, so the Louisiana and Texas rows above leave out gas produced there, 670,182 MMcf marketed in 2024, which would rank between Wyoming and Alaska in a combined table. Louisiana’s own line covers onshore and state-water wells only.

What the consumption column contains

EIA’s total consumption is the sum of lease fuel, plant fuel, pipeline and distribution use and deliveries to consumers (residential, commercial, industrial, vehicle fuel and electric power). For the U.S. in 2024 that was 33,055,901 MMcf: 1,951,470 of lease and plant fuel (5.9%), 1,277,710 of pipeline and distribution use (3.9%) and 29,826,721 delivered to consumers (90.2%). The largest consuming states are Texas (5.35 Tcf, 16.2% of the U.S.), Louisiana (2.03), California (1.94), Pennsylvania (1.92) and Florida (1.69).

The mix explains why a state’s ratio can mislead. In West Virginia lease and plant fuel come to 149,379 MMcf, 50% of the state’s consumption, while homes, businesses, factories and power plants took 117,195. In New Mexico the field and plant share is 38%. Louisiana is the opposite case: 294,544 MMcf of pipeline and distribution use, 15% of its total, and an industrial sector that took 1,187,548 MMcf. EIA’s explanatory note says lease fuel is estimated by assuming that the share of production used as lease fuel by survey respondents matches the share of gross withdrawals used as lease fuel by all operators, so the estimate is tied to the gross figure and not to a meter on each lease.

11 states and the Gulf produce more than they burn

Table 4 lists every area where dry production exceeded total consumption in 2024, ranked by the size of the gap. The gap is shown in billion cubic feet a day, dividing by the 366 days of 2024. Pennsylvania’s surplus of 5,379,698 MMcf is 14.7 Bcf/d, the largest in the country even though Texas produces 38% more dry gas, because Texas’s own consumption of 5.35 Tcf is 2.8 times Pennsylvania’s.

Concentration is high at the top. The four largest surpluses, Pennsylvania, Texas, New Mexico and West Virginia, make up 69% of the 23.01 Tcf total. Their ratios are very different. Pennsylvania and Texas are large on both sides of the ledger, at 3.80 and 1.88. New Mexico (10.68) and West Virginia (10.41) use little and produce a lot, so about 91% and 90% of their dry gas is not used in the state. North Dakota (4.65), Wyoming (4.73) and Colorado (3.24) sit in the middle, and Ohio at 1.49 is the newest member of the group. Utah is the marginal case: 291,928 MMcf of dry gas against 276,500 consumed, a ratio of 1.06 and a surplus of 15,428 MMcf.

Texas shows what a ratio can hide. A 1.88 ratio looks unremarkable next to Pennsylvania’s 3.80, yet Texas’s 4.71 Tcf surplus is the second largest anywhere, and its consumption alone, 16.2% of the country’s, is larger than the dry production of any state except Texas itself and Pennsylvania. The state’s industrial and electric power sectors took 2,033,424 and 2,121,502 MMcf of deliveries in 2024. The gas burned per megawatt-hour guide shows what that power-plant load means in fuel terms.

Forty areas that use more than they make

17 of the 52 areas report no natural gas production at all: 16 states and the District of Columbia. They consumed 5.35 Tcf in 2024, 16.2% of the national total, and none of that gas came from wells in those states. Their combined consumption is almost exactly Texas’s: 5,349,273 MMcf against 5,348,651. Another 23 states do produce gas but fall short of their own use, from Arkansas, whose dry production covered 93% of its consumption, to Florida, whose 265 MMcf covered 0.016%. California is the largest deficit, 1.82 Tcf, with a dry-gas supply that covers 6.1% of what it uses.

The ratio tells two stories in this table. Arkansas (93%), Alaska (76%), Montana (45%) and Kansas (38%) produce a meaningful share of their own use, and for those states a change in output can move the picture. For California, Florida, New York and the rest of the long tail the production line is too small to matter to the balance, and the shortfall is set by consumption alone. The natural gas prices by state guide covers what those states pay. Nine of the ten highest 2025 residential prices in that guide, from Hawaii and Florida to Vermont, belong to areas in this table; Texas is the exception.

A surplus is not the same as shipments

Production minus consumption is an accounting difference, not a pipeline measurement. It absorbs changes in underground storage and any gas that crosses the state line in either direction. Louisiana and Texas show the effect most clearly. Louisiana’s international exports were 2,669,013 MMcf in 2024, matching, within 1 MMcf, the combined shipments of the Sabine Pass, Cameron, Calcasieu Pass and Plaquemines terminals (2,669,012). That is 1.70 times the state’s own 1,572,660 MMcf surplus. Adding the 514,089 MMcf surplus of the federal offshore Gulf, which EIA reports separately, still leaves the terminals 582,264 MMcf short, and the state put a net 21,126 MMcf into storage that year, which widens the gap. Louisiana’s liquefaction plants therefore ran on gas produced in other states, apart from small reporting differences.

Texas lies at the other end. Its international exports were 3,463,889 MMcf, 74% of its 4,705,544 MMcf surplus. Of that, the Corpus Christi and Freeport terminals shipped 1,334,232 MMcf as LNG. Maryland and Georgia complete the picture from the deficit side: Maryland produced 5 MMcf of dry gas and consumed 291,171, yet Cove Point shipped 255,164 MMcf of LNG; Georgia produced nothing and consumed 759,705, while Elba Island shipped 101,390. Gas has to arrive in those states before it can leave them. The LNG export terminals guide follows the plants one by one.

At the national level the lines nearly close. In 2024 the dry gas surplus of 4,669,030 MMcf exceeded net exports of 4,562,022 by 107,008. Adding the net 4,648 MMcf drawn from storage, the lines miss by 111,656 MMcf, 0.34% of consumption. In 2025 the surplus grew to 5.76 Tcf as exports reached 8.97 Tcf. The Henry Hub, TTF and JKM comparison shows what LNG did to the export share of production over the same years.

Where the surplus came from

In 2015 U.S. dry production was 27.07 Tcf and consumption 27.24 Tcf, a ratio of 0.99. By 2024 the ratio was 1.14. The national numbers hide large reversals among the states, and Table 8 puts the dry-gas ratio in 2015 beside 2024 for 16 areas. Pennsylvania’s ratio stayed at 3.79 and 3.80, but only because its dry production (53%) and its consumption (53%) grew by the same amount. New Mexico’s ratio rose from 4.60 to 10.68 and West Virginia’s from 7.11 to 10.41, as dry output grew 2.9 and 2.5 times while consumption grew 24% and 72%.

The losers are as instructive as the winners. Wyoming’s ratio fell from 14.8 to 4.73 because its dry production fell 43% while its consumption rose 77%; marketed production dropped from 1.81 Tcf in 2015 to 1.05 in 2024 and 0.94 in 2025. Arkansas went from 3.47 to 0.93, a state that produced 1,009,831 MMcf of dry gas in 2015 and 355,170 in 2024. Kansas, level with its own use at 0.99 in 2015, now covers 38% of it. Utah fell from 1.73 to 1.06 and Montana from 0.66 to 0.45. Ohio went the other way: from 0.98 in 2015 to 1.49 in 2024, a state that produced slightly less than it used and now produces about half again as much. The federal offshore Gulf, which consumes little of its own output, fell from 12.7 to 7.5 as its dry output halved. Alaska moved from 0.98 to 0.76, driven by consumption growing faster than dry production.

U.S. marketed production grew from 28.77 Tcf in 2015 to 43.23 Tcf in 2025, an increase of 50%. Texas added 4.77 Tcf of that, Pennsylvania 2.86, New Mexico 2.89 and West Virginia 2.28. The latest year was uneven. New Mexico’s marketed gas rose 14.8% between 2024 and 2025, Texas’s 5.3% and West Virginia’s 5.3%, while Wyoming’s fell 10.9% and Arkansas’s 9.0%. Total consumption and dry production by state have no 2025 values yet in the annual tables, so a 2025 balance on the basis used above cannot be computed. The Waha negative price guide explains why Permian growth outran its pipelines.

What moved the national balance between 2015 and 2024

The national surplus is a small difference between two large numbers, and it moved a long way in nine years. In 2015 U.S. dry production was 27.07 Tcf against 27.24 Tcf consumed, a shortfall of 0.18 Tcf. In 2024 the figures were 37.72 and 33.06, a surplus of 4.67 Tcf. The swing of 4.85 Tcf is the net of a 10.66 Tcf rise in dry production and a 5.81 Tcf rise in consumption, so consumption growth took back about 55% of the added gas before it could show up as surplus. Table 10 splits the swing by area for the 16 areas in Table 8, using each area’s change in dry production less consumption.

Six areas supply the gain: New Mexico (+2.12 Tcf), Pennsylvania (+1.88), West Virginia (+1.75), Texas (+1.74), Louisiana (+1.28) and Ohio (+0.70), which add up to +9.46 Tcf, nearly twice the net national change. How much of each state’s extra dry gas survived as surplus differs sharply. New Mexico’s own consumption rose by 3% of its added dry gas, West Virginia’s by 7% and Pennsylvania’s by 26%, while Louisiana’s rose by 30%, Ohio’s by 38% and Texas’s by 42%. Texas added 2.97 Tcf of dry production, more than any other area in Table 10, and still ranks fourth on the change in balance because its consumption grew by 1.24 Tcf, almost twice Pennsylvania’s 0.66 Tcf, the next largest of the six.

Three areas moved the other way for production reasons. Wyoming (-0.85 Tcf), Arkansas (-0.74) and the federal offshore Gulf (-0.61) together took 2.21 Tcf off the balance, almost all of it falling production: their dry output dropped 2.04 Tcf while their consumption changed by only +0.16 Tcf. The rest of the country behaves differently. The remaining areas, which are not broken out here, changed their dry production by -0.37 Tcf and their consumption by +2.06 Tcf, so their balance fell by 2.42 Tcf. That is the same order of size as the three production-driven losses, and the 36 remaining areas are all deficit areas in Table 5, so the fall came from gas use rising where little or none is made. The 7.27 Tcf gain across the sixteen listed areas therefore shrinks to the 4.85 Tcf national swing once the remaining 36 areas are counted.

Where the 2025 increase came from

The national lines in Table 7 can also be read as a change from 2024 to 2025. Dry production rose 1.56 Tcf, to 39.29 Tcf. Exports rose 1.26 Tcf, which is 81% of the rise in production, and consumption rose 0.47 Tcf, or 30%. The two shares add to more than 100 percent because the other lines moved too: net withdrawals from storage were 0.11 Tcf higher, imports 0.02 Tcf higher and the unreconciled remainder 0.04 Tcf smaller. The supply lines, dry production, imports and storage withdrawals, rose a combined 1.69 Tcf, and the use lines, exports and consumption, rose 1.73 Tcf, so the remainder moved by -0.040 Tcf.

The relationship between the surplus and net exports reversed. In 2024 the dry gas surplus of 4.67 Tcf exceeded net exports of 4.56 Tcf by 0.11 Tcf. In 2025 the surplus of 5.76 Tcf was smaller than net exports of 5.80 Tcf by 0.04 Tcf, a difference that the 0.11 Tcf of net storage withdrawals more than covers, leaving the 0.07 Tcf remainder shown in Table 7. Net exports took 12.1% of dry production in 2024 and 14.8% in 2025, so a larger share of what U.S. wells produced left the country. The LNG export terminals guide follows the plants behind that rise, and the table here says nothing about which state’s gas filled them.

Marketed production rose 1.85 Tcf, or 4.5%, and two states account for most of it. Texas added 0.64 Tcf and New Mexico 0.53 Tcf, together 63% of the national increase. Pennsylvania (0.25), Louisiana (0.20) and West Virginia (0.18) follow. Wyoming (-0.11), Ohio (-0.06) and Arkansas (-0.03) fell, by 0.20 Tcf combined. Not all of the added marketed gas reached the dry total: the gap between the two counts widened from 3.66 Tcf in 2024 to 3.94 Tcf in 2025, so about 15% of the increase in marketed gas went out as natural gas liquids, and dry production rose 1.56 Tcf against 1.85 Tcf marketed. A 2025 balance by state cannot be built, because the annual tables have no 2025 dry production or consumption by state yet; the state-level reading of 2025 stops at marketed gas.

The balance by Census division

The Census Bureau groups the 50 states and the District of Columbia into four regions and nine divisions. Adding the EIA rows within each division gives a map-level view of Table 4 and Table 5 that a state ranking hides. The sums are arithmetic on dry production and consumption, not a measure of shipments, and the federal offshore Gulf belongs to no division.

Only three divisions produced more than they used. West South Central, which holds Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Arkansas, ran 7.90 Tcf ahead at 1.92 times its use, the Mountain division 3.92 Tcf ahead at 2.66 times, and the Middle Atlantic 3.41 Tcf ahead at 1.87 times. The Middle Atlantic figure is a net: Pennsylvania’s 5.38 Tcf surplus sits against a 1.97 Tcf shortfall in New York and New Jersey. The six remaining divisions fell short, led by East North Central (2.80 Tcf, 0.43 times its use), Pacific (2.61 Tcf, 0.15) and East South Central (2.08 Tcf, 0.07). New England produces no gas and used 0.95 Tcf.

Pennsylvania and West Virginia fall in different divisions, which hides how large their combined position is. Their surpluses add to 8.19 Tcf, 1.75 times the national surplus of 4.67 Tcf. Take the two states out and the other 50 areas together used 3.52 Tcf more than they produced. The same arithmetic on the four Census regions gives the Northeast +2.46 Tcf, the South +4.14, the West +1.32 and the Midwest -3.76 Tcf: the Midwest made 46% of the gas it used, and Ohio’s 0.68 Tcf surplus is outweighed several times by the deficits of the other East North Central states. None of this says gas moved from one division to another. The balance for a division is an accounting difference, and interstate pipeline flows, which these tables do not carry, decide what actually crossed a boundary.

How much of their own use the deficit states cover

Table 5 ranks the 40 deficit areas by the size of the shortfall. Sorting them by coverage, dry production as a share of consumption, shows where the shortfall actually sits. The first group is the 17 areas that report no production at all. The second is a further 13 that produce less than 1 percent of what they use: Florida, New York, Illinois, Indiana, Arizona, Tennessee, Oregon, Missouri, Maryland, Nevada, Nebraska, Idaho and South Dakota. These 30 areas consumed 12.92 Tcf, 39% of U.S. consumption, and produced 0.020 Tcf between them, so they hold 70% of the 18.34 Tcf total shortfall.

Few areas sit between the extremes. California, Michigan, Alabama and Mississippi cover between 3.9% and 9.6% of their use and account for 22% of the shortfall, 4.12 Tcf, with California alone at 1.82 Tcf. Virginia, Kentucky, Kansas and Montana cover 10 to under 50 percent, and the two areas that come closest, Alaska and Arkansas, cover 76% and 93%. Those six states together account for 7% of the shortfall. Alaska is the only deficit area that also appears in Table 3, and lease and plant fuel make up most of its consumption. The pattern matters when reading any production change: in the 34 areas that make nothing or under 10 percent of what they use, doubling output would cut their combined shortfall by only 1.8%.

Matching the EIA series to the job

A comparison of production with use belongs on dry gas and total consumption, as in Tables 4 and 5. A comparison of what the wells delivered belongs on gross withdrawals, as in the flaring guide, which divides vented and flared gas by the gross figure so that it matches the 12,918,987 MMcf Texas total in Table 1. Oil comparisons follow a similar logic in the oil production by state guide, where Texas also leads and the same question of which count to use arises, and the US oil production hub gathers those state and national balances in one place.

The units can mislead as easily as the counts. EIA reports state gas in million cubic feet, and one trillion cubic feet is one million of those. A volume of 41.38 Tcf a year is 113.1 Bcf/d in 2024, and 118.4 Bcf/d in 2025 when the year had 365 days. Dividing by the wrong number of days moves a daily rate by 0.27%. For converting those volumes into heat, the therms, Ccf, Mcf and MMBtu guide gives the factors.

Data and sources, all checked November 3, 2026 (EIA release dated October 30, 2026; next release November 30, 2026): U.S. Energy Information Administration natural gas annual tables for gross withdrawals, repressuring, vented and flared, nonhydrocarbon gases removed, marketed production, NGPL production, dry production and total consumption; the U.S. natural gas summary and state summaries such as Louisiana, Texas and Alaska; LNG exports by point of exit; the table definitions for production and consumption. U.S. Census Bureau, Census regions and divisions. Ratios, surpluses, shares, rankings and per-day rates are computed from those tables. California, Maryland, Georgia, Hawaii and the other states omitted from the 2015 history table appear only in the 2024 tables.