美国12州总检察长联名致函FERC，支持为Oracle新墨西哥数据中心供电的Green Chile天然气管道，反对扩大联邦环评

The attorneys general of 12 US states have asked federal regulators to authorize construction of a natural gas pipeline needed to power an Oracle Corp. data center in New Mexico, arguing that a broader environmental review could complicate similar projects across the country.

The dozen states “have a direct stake” in the legal fight playing out over the 17.8-mile proposed pipeline dubbed the Green Chile Project in New Mexico’s Doña Ana County, they said in a Wednesday letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The Energy Transfer LP pipeline would move as much as 400 million cubic feet per day of natural gas to power generation infrastructure for Project Jupiter, a massive data-center campus being developed by Oracle to serve OpenAI.

Several of the states are major natural-gas producers and several are trying to attract data centers and the power generation needed to serve them. Data-center developers are increasingly looking to generate their own electricity using natural gas rather than wait to be connected to the grid.

Read More: The Staggering Costs of a Single Data Center, From Land to Chips

The 12 attorneys general are challenging New Mexico’s argument that federal regulators must consider the environmental consequences of both the pipeline and the data center it would serve, contending FERC does not approve data center facilities in states and has no authority to regulate them.

They believe that FERC’s treatment of the Green Chile Project could establish a regulatory approach that gets applied to similar gas-fed data-center developments elsewhere. The signatories are West Virginia, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio and South Carolina.

Read More: New Mexico Demands Review of Oracle’s Gas Pipeline Plan

The unusual involvement of states with no direct role in the New Mexico project underscores the stakes surrounding the power needed for the rapid US data-center build-out. The various approvals needed to construct such power-generation facilities have emerged as a key target for regulators and advocacy groups opposing data centers.

Some data center projects in other states will also need power generation facilities that require their own short pipeline laterals connecting to a larger interstate pipeline system, just as Green Chile will pull gas off Energy Transfer’s larger Transwestern pipeline system.

New Mexico, for its part, is arguing for a broader federal environmental review, saying the projects lack “independent utility.” The 12 other states are effectively defending the limits of federal regulatory authority.