Gas Stoves Are Barely a Blip in US Home Energy Consumption

In 2020, a big year for cooking at home, Americans burned an estimated 92 trillion British thermal units of natural gas in their stoves. This figure, from the Residential Energy Consumption Survey that the US Energy Information Administration conducts every five years (and recently finished releasing data from), may sound like a lot. It was, however, just 2.2% of residential natural gas use, down from 2.9% in 2015. Space and water heating together used 95.6%.

That means home cooking with natural gas accounted for 1% of US residential energy consumption, 0.3% of overall US natural gas consumption and 0.1% of total US energy consumption in 2020, a year during which energy use was depressed by the pandemic. Perhaps more to the point, residential natural gas cooking was responsible for about 0.1% of US greenhouse gas emissions in 2020.