Bold claim: America’s hidden fossil fuel footprint is larger than most people realize, and mapping it in detail reveals the true scale of our climate challenge. But here’s where it gets controversial: some officials want to roll back how we track those emissions, and that tension makes precise data more crucial than ever.
A team of researchers has released a refined version of Vulcan, a comprehensive dataset that tracks CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion across the United States at an exceptionally fine granularity. Their latest update, published in Nature Scientific Data, expands the 2022 emissions view and includes a map highlighting hotspots of fossil fuel CO2 output. This work emphasizes that you can’t manage what you can’t measure, especially when policy directions are shifting.
“Taxpayers have a right to this data,” says Kevin Gurney, a professor at Northern Arizona University’s School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems. With debates over the future of the EPA’s greenhouse gas reporting, the Vulcan data becomes a critical resource for understanding the national carbon footprint.
What Vulcan does
For two decades, Vulcan has produced highly detailed maps of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel sources. Funded by multiple agencies, the project aims to quantify the North American carbon budget, identify where emissions come from and where they are absorbed, and support high-resolution observations of fossil fuel CO2.
The 2022 map shows where emissions were strongest. The bright red areas align with population-dense regions, such as the East Coast and major cities like Dallas. In general, eastern parts of the country show higher emissions due to larger populations and greater activity.
Despite its precision, the map is a visualization of a much larger data corpus. According to co-author Pawlok Dass, the Vulcan outputs consist of terabytes of data requiring high-performance computing to process. The visualization only scratches the surface of emissions data at the level of individual cities, road segments, and specific facilities.
Policy context and potential gaps
In September, the EPA proposed ending the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP), arguing it would save U.S. businesses billions in regulatory costs while still meeting Clean Air Act obligations. The GHGRP currently requires facilities emitting more than 25,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent per year to report annually, covering roughly 13,000 facilities that account for a substantial majority of national emissions.
The proposal has drawn political opposition from multiple sides, and its fate remains uncertain. If federal tracking gaps emerge, independent efforts like Vulcan could help fill them—provided they can maintain funding.
Gurney emphasizes resilience: even amid funding cuts and setbacks to federal science reporting, his team remains committed to producing and sharing data that informs climate science and environmental quality.
Discussion prompt
As policy directions shift, how should researchers balance independent data collection with government reporting requirements? Do you see value in ultra-high-resolution emission maps for informing local strategies, or do you worry about the potential politicization of data?
