Water is responsible for 12.6% of US energy use

According to a research from the University of  Texas titled “Evaluating the energy consumed for water use in the United States“, water is responsible for 12.6% of US energy use:

From the abstract:

This letter consists of a first-order analysis of the primary energy embedded in water in the United States. Using a combination of top-down sectoral assessments of energy use together with a bottom-up allocation of energy-for-water on a component-wise and service-specific level, our analysis concludes that energy use in the residential, commercial, industrial and power sectors for direct water and steam services was approximately 12.3 ± 0.3 quadrillion BTUs or 12.6% of the 2010 annual primary energy consumption in the United States. Additional energy was used to generate steam for indirect process heating, space heating and electricity generation.

The full paper is available from Environmental Research Letters.