EIA — U.S. Energy Information Administration

The official US energy data: petroleum, natural gas, electricity, coal, renewables, nuclear, total energy, international energy. Production, consumption, prices, reserves, imports/exports — at national, state, and (for electricity) plant level. Free, requires a free API key.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1856+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Why this matters for AI agents

For energy questions — "what's the price of natural gas?", "how much electricity comes from solar?", "are gasoline prices rising?" — EIA is the source. Government-grade data, no commercial markup. Pair with FRED for energy-related macro indicators and NOAA for energy-relevant weather context.

Common flows:

• Spot prices. "What's WTI crude trading at?" → crude oil spot price series.
• State electricity mix. "What % of California electricity is solar?" → state-level generation by source.
• Retail gasoline and diesel. "What is the average US price for regular gasoline?" → us_fuel_price — the weekly US average pump price from EIA's Weekly Retail Gasoline and Diesel Prices survey, for the grade asked (regular by default — the national headline figure — or midgrade, premium, all grades, or diesel). eia_petroleum with product "gasoline" now honours the same grade and defaults to the US average rather than every grade in every region mixed together.
• Natural gas storage. "How much working gas in storage?" → weekly EIA-915 reports.

Auth

EIA Open Data API requires a free key from https://www.eia.gov/opendata/register.php. Pass via _apiKey. Generous rate limits.

Major datasets

Series IDs

EIA series follow dataset_id.frequency.region.product patterns. Examples:

• PET.RWTC.D — WTI crude, daily
• NG.RNGC1.D — Natural gas Henry Hub, daily
• ELEC.GEN.SUN-CA-99.M — California solar generation, monthly
• PET.EMM_EPMR_PTE_NUS_DPG.W — US weekly average regular gasoline price

Use the eia_search tool to find IDs rather than constructing them manually.

Common pitfalls

• Reporting lag varies. Petroleum prices update weekly with ~3-day lag. Electricity generation is monthly with ~2-month lag. Don't assume "current" matches across datasets.
• Heat content vs volume. Natural gas reported in BCF (billion cubic feet), MMcf, and energy units (BTU, MMBtu). Conversions matter for cross-fuel comparison.
• Net vs gross generation. Power-plant generation has subtle definitions. "Net" subtracts plant-internal use. EIA mostly publishes net. Don't double-count.
• State electricity by primary mover. EIA's state-level mix is by primary mover (steam turbine, combined cycle, etc.) AND fuel — same plant can have multiple categorizations. Aggregate to the level your question requires.
• Forecasts are scenarios. AEO (Annual Energy Outlook) is a reference-case projection plus side-cases. Don't treat reference case as "what will happen."
• No market-real-time prices. EIA spot prices are official end-of-day; for intra-day market prices you need a commercial feed, not EIA.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "eia": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/eia/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/eia/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1856+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/eia_series \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"route":"petroleum/pri/gnd"}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/eia_series. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-eia is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/eia/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "eia": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-eia"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Eia data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT