An advocacy group argues Project Jupiter’s application for an air quality permit should be thrown out because the natural gas pipeline that would fuel the massive Southern New Mexico data center has yet to be legally authorized.
In a motion filed Tuesday, New Energy Economy noted State Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard has twice denied a Project Jupiter-related application — most recently last month — to run a portion of natural gas pipeline through state trust land. The pipeline, dubbed the Green Chile Lateral, is seemingly the only way to supply the expected 400 million cubic feet of gas the data center will require each day.
“Whether Project Jupiter will ever exist now depends upon an entirely separate administrative proceeding challenging the Commissioner’s denial of the Green Chili Lateral pipeline. That appeal has not even begun. It may take years. It may never succeed,” New Energy Economy’s motion states.
It adds, “The ability to deliver approximately 400 million cubic feet of natural gas every day is not merely one feature of Project Jupiter. It is the project. Without fuel, there is no electric generation. Without electric generation, there is no data center.”
The air quality permit is now the biggest barrier to the completion of the lightning rod project, which is part of the $500 billion, four-year Stargate initiative to build infrastructure for artificial intelligence for companies like Oracle and OpenAI.
Max Shepherd, the New Mexico Environment Department air quality permit hearing officer overseeing the case, ordered parties on Wednesday to submit responses supporting or opposing New Energy Economy’s motion by Tuesday.
He also ordered Yucca Growth Infrastructure — the developers behind Project Jupiter — and the state’s energy department to answer questions on whether the gas supply has any legal alternative source, whether they will appeal Garcia Richard’s latest denial, whether the project remains buildable in light of that denial and whether the source can still be “completed in a reasonable time.”
Jennifer Bradfute, counsel for Yucca Growth Infrastructure, wrote in an email Project Jupiter is “fully committed to addressing all regulatory requirements” as the development moves ahead.
“Yucca Growth Infrastructure will submit its response by the August 11 deadline, and that filing will speak for itself as part of the public record,” she wrote.
The New Mexico Environment Department also “will address the issues raised in the motion through its formal response,” spokesperson Drew Goretzka wrote in an email.
“The hearing officer deserves credit for cutting to the chase,” Mariel Nanasi, executive director and president of New Energy Economy, wrote in a statement. “His order asks exactly the right questions. … It would be a colossal waste of resources to conduct costly hearings over hypothetical projects.”
Shepherd will make a decision after he has evaluated the parties’ briefs, which could also be reviewed by the deputy secretary of the Environment Department, he wrote in an email.
Youth United for Climate Crisis Action — better known as YUCCA but not affiliated with Yucca Growth Infrastructure — submitted a response in support of New Energy Economy’s motion Wednesday.
“We hopped on quickly to support it, because we do see this application as fundamentally incomplete, if we don’t know where Project Jupiter even is getting its power from to build this proposed power plant,” Esperanza Chairez, the organization’s policy campaign manager, said in an interview.
Attorneys for the developers successfully pushed the Environment Department last week to move a hearing on the data center’s air quality permit from October to Sept. 14, citing too little time between the scheduled hearing and the Environment Department’s Nov. 23 deadline to issue the permit.
But Colin Cox, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, has filed a new motion requesting that the hearing be moved back to its original date.
“At this point, I don’t think that the hearing date is going to change,” Chairez said. “However, I think that the matters that New Energy Economy raises are super crucial and I hope that NMED follows its own procedural law in this matter and at the very least, raises these critical questions about this power planet being proposed, and this application in front of them.”
