Opponents Protest LNG Pipeline Plan to Power Massive AI Data Center in New Mexico

Interview with Jon Copeland, an organizer with Hold the Line, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

New Mexico AI data center Project Jupiter

Texas leads all states in wind power generation and is second only to California in solar. Yet it also produces more oil and natural gas than other states, supplying more than 40 percent of the nation’s total crude oil and about a quarter of its methane “natural” gas output.

Two companies, Oracle and Open AI, have plans to build a huge artificial intelligence data center in southern New Mexico, near its border with Texas. To power the center they call Project Jupiter, the companies plan on using methane, which is 100 times more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide emissions over the short term.

Energy Transfer—the same company that built the Dakota Access pipeline under the Missouri River near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation—recently announced plans to build a 17-mile pipeline called Green Chile to power the data center.  A grassroots group in west Texas called Hold the Line is fighting the project and recently got a boost from FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Jon Copeland, an organizer with Hold the Line, about the state of play of the project and what comes next.

JON COPELAND: Hold the Line campaign’s focus really is to empower communities to respond to the land grab, the eminent domain portion of oil and gas extraction that’s not very widely talked about, as we consider it to be unconstitutional for private for-profit entities to be taking land and displacing families for an extractive system. In Texas, the legal and political environment makes it easier for a pipeline company to secure survey access for their project than it is for a high-speed rail project they’ve been talking about since I was in high school and still hasn’t been built, yet we’ve had multiple pipelines that have been successfully built in this rigged system.
MELINDA TUHUS: I was rereading some of the stuff that you had sent about a feeder pipeline that you got a positive response from FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, that you thought was an important decision. Can you talk about that? Just say what it is and what the decision was?
JON COPELAND: What had happened was Hold the Line campaign. We worked in the community that’s impacted by the data center that’s proposed. Well, they’re already actually constructing the data center. They’re just now trying to get the permits for the pipelines that are supposed to feed the data center. Where I live now in West Texas near El Paso, we are impacted by this data center both by our air quality, which is already bad and our water, which we are already having water issues in this region. We got involved with the community, informed them. There is a public participation process when it comes to the pipelines feeding this data center and we filed an intervention along with multiple public comments. We filed them on their behalf because FERC’s system of filing comments and their public participation system entirely is very difficult for the average person to use and I would say by design.
In our intervention, we had cited the National Historic Preservation Act because there have been cultural artifacts found in the area of the data center and in the area of these proposed pipelines feeding the data center. And we filed our intervention on the very last day and just a few hours after we filed this intervention—when the comment window had been open for a very long period of time—right before the deadline, we received a notification of service that a FERC staff member had protested the pipeline citing the same National Historic Preservation Act, noting that there was missing documentation.

And so what we’re taking away from that is that there was someone inside FERC that, “Oh, hey, there’s this law that we need to follow. We noticed that it’s our responsibility to ensure that that law is followed.” Our air quality is already bad here and the Mesilla Valley contamination tends to be contained because of how the valley is shaped and how the mountains serve as like a shield and they’re building the data center very high up on the valley.

So any emissions that may occur will definitely sink into the bowl of this valley.

MELINDA TUHUS: Is your goal to stop the pipeline project and then that would also stop the data project? What’s your main focus?

JON COPELAND: While the industry may come out waiving $100 bills for their land, which we might argue they’re offering pennies on the dollar for this land. These families, they may need that money because we’ve got rising food prices, we’ve got rising fuel prices. The cost of living is so high and so difficult to where a lot of these folks simply cannot say “no.” So if we do have folks that want to stop these pipelines, we will tell them what avenues that they can take to stop that, including the public participation process at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

For information, visit Hold The Line Campaign on Facebook @Hold-the-Line-Campaign; on Instagram @HoldThelineCampaign; Hold the Line Campaign – Borderlands at the Action Network at actionnetwork.org/groups/green-chile; and watch Jon Copeland’s reels on Pipeline Safety at instagram.com/reels/DP6jxeEEXcw.

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