Natural gas-fired power plants in Texas consume more water than the city of Austin in 2024, according to a recent analysis by the Sierra Club.

Power generation facilities that primarily burn natural gas in Texas rely on vast amounts of water mainly to generate steam and for cooling. Combined, their water use added up to 56 billion gallons in 2024, well above Austin’s annual use of roughly 45 billion gallons per year. Coal-fired power plants consumed 34 billion gallons of water that year, according to the group’s recent report, “Watts Wasting Texas Water.”

“These coal gas plants depend on water just as much as they depend on the fossil fuels that they’re burning,” said Lindsay Mader, deputy press secretary for the Sierra Club and the report’s author.

The fast-growing, drought-prone state has seen a boom in power plant generation to accommodate population growth and to provide electricity to dozens of data centers proposed across Texas. This has placed increasing scrutiny on the state’s over-allocated rivers, reservoirs, and groundwater supplies.

Cyrus Reed, conservation director for the Sierra Club’s Lone Star Chapter, said renewable energy sources – mainly wind, solar, and batteries – are already proving they can operate with much less water than fossil fuel power plants. Texas coal plants consume an average of 492 gallons of water per megawatt-hour of electricity produced; gas-fired power plants consume 228 gallons per megawatt-hour. Renewables, on the other hand, only consume about six gallons per megawatt-hour.

That has allowed state water planners to make faulty assumptions about how much water Texas will need for power generation over the coming decades, Reed said. The Texas Water Development Board has said the state needs $174 billion for more than 3,000 water supply strategies to ensure the state has enough water for the future.

“They’re really ignoring a lot of the strategies and opportunities in the electric sector,” Reed said.