AWS data center to tap local aquifer for water
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is developing Project Green, a new data center in New Florence, Montgomery County, that will draw water from an aquifer deep beneath the city.
And Amazon hopes to tap the source with a high-yield well.
The data center complex will be located south of Hudson Road and west of Ellis Road on the eastern side of town. Water will be sourced from deep within the Cambrian-Ordovician aquifer, with wells drilled to depths of 1,500 feet to avoid interfering with local private wells.
According to a report by CDM Smith, a global engineering and construction firm, the Project Green campus will draw 2.9 million gallons of water annually. The full 17-building campus is projected to use approximately 50 million gallons of water each year, which is comparable to the annual water usage of a golf course. Each individual building's water usage is roughly equivalent to that of a restaurant.
Scott Kaden, the Groundwater Section chief at the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, said this amount of usage is common with several wells across the state. "There are a lot of high-yield wells throughout the country and throughout the state that produce a similar amount of water, whether it's for a public water supply or irrigation," he says.
The Cambrian-Ordovician aquifer, made of limestone and dolomite sedimentary rock, is extensive and holds more than 23 trillion gallons of groundwater in the region of the data center. This volume is equivalent to more than 1.5 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. About 8% of the Cambrian-Ordovician aquifer is in use, and the data center will contribute an additional 0.03% to this total.
Heavy water users like the Project Green facilities are required to report their water usage to MoDNR. Still, there are no regulations on water use because Missouri is a riparian state, where landowners have the right to use water that flows within or along their property. "But you cannot affect your neighbor's ability to do the same thing," Scott cautions. "And if that does happen, if you affect your neighbor's ability to use the water, then that becomes a civil matter."
According to CDM Smith's report, long-term water-level monitoring of the Cambrian-Ordovician aquifer within the data center region shows stable overall water levels, with some monitoring locations experiencing increases. The report cites water levels in a bedrock well in Vandalia, in nearby Audrian County, located about 30 miles north of New Florence, which increased by approximately 5 feet between 2007 and 2017.
However, there is an older well in New Florence that doesn't reflect the same trends. Records at this well date back to 1981 and show a steady, though slightly decreasing depth in water level. "But when you look at the thickness of the aquifer, the aquifer goes down 1,400 feet," Scott explains, "so there's still over 1,000 feet of water in the aquifer in this area of New Florence."
Scott says that while the aquifer is vast, water levels can still vary from well to well. "You can't just pick one spot and say that the whole aquifer is behaving like it is at this one spot. You have to look at all of them." Another well in Graham Cave State Park, a few miles west of New Florence, shows a steadier trend in water levels since at least 2009.
CDM Smith, citing MoDNR projections for 2060, indicates that the aquifer will naturally refill at a rate of 406 million gallons per day. Total water withdrawals from all other wells using this aquifer, excluding the data center, are estimated to be only 71 million gallons per day.
MoDNR predicts that only about 17% of the water naturally flowing into the aquifer each year will be used in the region where the data center is located by 2060. The aquifer will essentially gain more than 600 Olympic-sized swimming pools of water daily, while about 100 pools will be pumped out for all other combined uses, aside from the data center use.
