Residential and commercial buildings use cooking stoves and heating furnaces powered by natural gas or heating oil.
Households and offices consume fossil fuels for heating, supplied either through pipelines or delivered by truck to fill on-site storage tanks. The combustion of these fuels emits CO2 into the atmosphere.
These buildings also generate organic waste that is processed through sewage systems or garbage collection and eventually decomposes into methane. While this methane can potentially be captured and used as fuel, it is not always tapped.
According to the EPA, this category excludes electricity generated by power plants but includes “distributed generation” from rooftop solar panels, because data on the generation, consumption, and storage of this energy remains private.