Creekstone Energy, the company behind a huge data center campus being built near Delta in Millard County, has announced that it’s in the process of patenting a “revolutionary technology” that can turn natural gas into water.
The new technology — which the developer said can capture water vapor from the exhaust of Creekstone’s own natural-gas-powered electricity generation and convert it into water — has been named GIGAWATER, which the company said is the “centerpiece” of its Project Oasis initiative at the Delta Gigasite campus.
“We at Creekstone Energy, we don’t believe Utah should have to choose between economic growth and responsible water stewardship,” the company’s founder and CEO Ray Conley told reporters in an embargoed virtual briefing last week, ahead of Wednesday’s announcement.
“Because Creekstone’s focused on building the largest data center campus in the world, that comes to the forefront very immediately,” Conley said. “We think that the data centers have to be designed for the places where they’re built. And because we’re building in Delta, in the arid West, it’s not just about minimizing local water demand from the beginning, which we’ve been focused on. But how do we innovate and how do we recognize ways to do this better?”
So Conley said Creekstone has “filed for a patent on a new technology that creates water,” designed to capture water vapor that’s created when natural gas is combusted to create electricity.
“To confirm the science holds at scale,” the company said in a news release Wednesday, Creekstone Energy has signed a research agreement with the University of Utah’s Energy & Geoscience Institute “to independently verify the technology.”
Though the company is likely several years away from generating water at a large scale, Conley said he wanted to announce it now, as the University of Utah prepares to start its research, because “I felt that it’s important for people to understand that data centers — at least some of us in the industry — are trying to push innovation forward to benefit the environment.”
“It’s something that can actually benefit Utah and not simply be a drain on resources,” he said.
As controversy over data centers have swept across the country, the majority of ire in Utah hasn’t been focused on the project near Delta, but rather on a different data center campus proposed by celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary in Box Elder County, in northern Utah. Amid intense backlash, the project area has been scaled back from 40,000 acres to 20,000 acres.
About 200 miles south of Box Elder County in a rural area, the Delta Gigasite is already under construction after five years of planning. There, Creekstone says it’s working to build the largest data center campus in the world meant to “enable leadership in the race to AI superintelligence,” according to its website.
Creekstone owns 1,143 acres near Delta, but the project’s footprint will also span across 30,000 acres owned by the Utah Trust Lands Administration that are under lease for solar, which the company says will generate the majority of the campus’ energy needs. Agreements have also already been struck to build a pipeline to bring natural gas from Wyoming to Utah.
At full build out, Creekstone says the campus will have more than 10 gigawatts of electrical capacity — more than double what the entire state of Utah currently consumes.
In April, the Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity awarded Creekstone Energy a post-performance tax incentive for its Millard County project. In exchange for the creation of 106 jobs with wages totaling $333 million over 20 years (averaging an annual salary of about $162,148 each), the company was awarded a 50% tax credit.
That post-performance refundable tax credit will save the company about $172 million in taxes over 20 years. That equates to a cost of about $1.6 million per job over the lifetime of the deal.
According to an April news release issued by the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity announcing the deal, Creekstone Energy is expected to invest more than $17 billion in Utah over the next two decades and generate more than $334 million in new state revenue.
Read the full report at UtahNewsDispatch.com.
