Texas requires no greenhouse gas disclosure in air permits
Three data centers are planned or under construction within roughly 30 miles of the Texas-New Mexico border, and the two for which emissions are publicly estimated — Project Jupiter and Meta’s El Paso facility — could together release up to 10 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually when fully built out, according to a ProPublica investigation co-published with El Paso Matters and The Texas Tribune. New Mexico’s state climate roadmap and El Paso’s local climate plan — each adopted in the past year at multi-million-dollar cost — did not account for the projects, the reporting found. The Army has shared scant information about emissions from a third, larger data center planned for Fort Bliss, so its emissions are unknown. The combined emissions from Project Jupiter and Meta’s data center, each of which would operate its own power plant, would exceed the 8.4 million tons that El Paso County and neighboring Hudspeth County released in 2019.
The El Paso metropolitan area, a region of 1.2 million people that sits where Texas’ westernmost boundary meets New Mexico and northern Mexico, is the site of the three facilities. Twenty miles separate Project Jupiter, an Oracle development in Doña Ana County, N.M., from the Meta Platforms data center under construction in El Paso. A third, larger project is planned at Fort Bliss Army post in east El Paso, less than a 30-minute drive from the Meta site. Once fully built out, the three data centers, each with its own power plant, will emit greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to the planet-warming emissions released by more than two million cars in a year, the report found. The three border-area projects are part of a national wave of data center construction driven by rapidly escalating demand for artificial intelligence services such as Claude and ChatGPT, according to the report. Texas alone has 596 data centers that are either in operation or planned across the state as of early September, according to research by The Texas Tribune.
Project Jupiter’s air permit, which has not been finalized, would authorize the facility’s fuel cells to release up to 8.8 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year, according to the report. New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has specifically lauded Oracle’s promise to use fuel cells for electricity instead of natural gas turbines, which would have used more water and produced more air pollution. Lujan Grisham didn’t address questions from El Paso Matters about the impact of the additional climate emissions the fuel cells would produce. The Meta power plant in El Paso could release up to 1.3 million tons of climate emissions every year, according to an estimate calculated by El Paso Matters from El Paso Electric regulatory filings and Environmental Protection Agency emissions factors. Nancy Seidman, a senior adviser with the Regulatory Assistance Project, a nonprofit that advocates for clean energy, backed up the estimate and wrote in an email to El Paso Matters that “regulators should weigh all emissions and other impacts like water usage, noise and local air pollution, which can affect public health, when they make decisions about data center projects.” She added that this is “particularly important when projects are phased over time, so that an accurate account can be made of the total, holistic impacts.”
The combined emissions from Project Jupiter and Meta’s data center — up to 10 million tons annually — would exceed the 8.4 million tons the region released in 2019. “This does add to our greenhouse gas emissions in a massive way,” said Gunnar Schade, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. “This is a huge source.” The Army has shared scant information about emissions from the Fort Bliss data center, which is still in “exclusive negotiations” with the developer, Carlyle Group.
Because the three projects are in two states with different approaches to climate regulation, and because no federal climate law exists, regulators have largely considered the projects’ impacts separately, the report found. “We’ve never had a national climate law passed by Congress,” Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School, told the news organizations. “And so what we’ve had in this country are primarily state and local efforts.” New Mexico has codified greenhouse gas reduction targets into state law. Texas has not.
The result, the report found, is that officials in one state have little say over a project happening minutes away in the other. New Mexico state Rep. Sarah Silva, a Democrat, represents the community of Chaparral, directly across the state line from Meta’s data center site. Her state can regulate air quality in New Mexico but not at the Texas construction site a few hundred yards away. “This is why we need federal regulation,” Silva said. “How do we knit something together that makes sense for our region when actually this is the job of the federal government?” Likewise, residents living in west El Paso across the state line from Project Jupiter have no say in that project despite sharing an aquifer that crosses the state boundary. “Emissions do not remain within the state where they originate,” Silva said.
The two states’ climate plans were adopted without considering the data centers. New Mexico officials celebrated publication of their climate plan last December; El Paso adopted its plan a few months later. Each plan was designed to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but neither accounted for the data center projects already underway nearby. The data centers are “going to undo a lot of the very expensive and very meaningful work a lot of people are doing,” New Mexico state climatologist Dave DuBois told El Paso Matters.
Local governments in El Paso and Doña Ana counties approved tax incentives for the projects in exchange for corporate investment, job creation and the prospect of attracting more technology companies to the region. State officials also provided incentives. More than a decade ago, Texas legislators approved a sales tax break on data center equipment, a decision that The Texas Tribune estimated could cost the state $3.2 billion in revenue over the next two years. New Mexico lawmakers declined a similar bill in 2021 but in 2025 approved a separate law allowing facilities such as Project Jupiter to generate their own electricity using natural gas; the law exempts those private power systems, known as microgrids, from renewable-energy requirements, even as New Mexico requires electric utilities to source 50% of the power they sell from clean energy by 2030.
The energy requirements of the projects are unprecedented in the region. Project Jupiter would draw electricity from a 2.45-gigawatt on-site facility built by Bloom Energy — enough to power around 1.5 million homes, the report said, and more than El Paso Electric has ever supplied to its 465,000 residential and commercial customers at one time. The Fort Bliss data center is expected to use 3 gigawatts, likely from natural gas turbines, according to Department of Defense officials who briefed reporters in April. AI hyperscale data center campuses such as Oracle’s and Meta’s are “cities in terms of their electricity consumption,” Peskoe said, and the facilities are cropping up so fast that the pace and scale of construction have “no real parallel, at least for 50, 60, 70 years, but probably ever” for the U.S. power industry.
Texas and New Mexico require different disclosures from the projects. Facilities in New Mexico seeking an air permit must disclose estimated greenhouse gas emissions; in Texas, the Commission on Environmental Quality does not require such disclosure. When El Paso Electric sought an air permit last fall for the Meta data center’s natural-gas power plant, the utility did not have to share estimated greenhouse gas emissions, and the Texas commission approved the permit 20 days after the filing under an expedited review. Meta directed questions about its data center’s power plant to El Paso Electric, which said the plant would operate “in compliance with state and federal standards.” El Paso Electric declined to share estimates of greenhouse gas emissions. A spokesperson for the commission said standard permits go through formal notice and comment procedures.
The data center emissions come as climate change has become increasingly evident in the El Paso metro area, which sits where Texas’ westernmost boundary meets New Mexico and northern Mexico. El Paso’s temperatures have risen faster than those of almost any other U.S. city since 1970, according to Climate Central, a nonprofit that quantifies climate shifts throughout the United States. Drought driven by climate change has amplified the impact of wind storms that fill the air in El Paso with hazardous dust in the spring and summertime. This year was the hottest on record in El Paso through the first nine months of 2026, according to the National Weather Service; similar records have been set across the state line in New Mexico. “If we started to do these kinds of things — having big data centers with natural-gas-fired turbines — it’s kind of like bringing back a lot of the retired plants that were more dirty, like coal,” DuBois said. Fernando Berjano, El Paso’s climate coordinator, wouldn’t comment specifically on effects resulting from the data centers in the region, but he said the kinds of power plants tied to them produce greenhouse gases that will make it harder for the city to meet its climate goals, as well as produce air pollutants. If emissions increase in the El Paso area, “that has an impact on air quality, that has an impact on pollution,” Berjano said, “which is something that we all know is not good.”
Even once-supportive state lawmakers have begun to reconsider. Silva initially backed Project Jupiter in part as an opportunity for long-term jobs. Last year she voted for a bill that included an amendment by state Sen. Michael Padilla, a Democrat from Albuquerque, exempting off-grid facilities like Project Jupiter from clean-energy laws for 20 years. Padilla said in an interview last year that the amendment’s path through the Legislature was a matter of legislative craft: “We worked this bill pretty much the entire session, but it did not quite get done. So, we found a piece of legislation that was very similar. That’s the legislative process. You have to be very creative to get your work done.” Silva soon soured on the project out of concern that it won’t employ enough local workers and because it won’t rely on zero-emission renewable energy. Oracle has said the data center will have 750 full-time employees when operational, and the company told Doña Ana County officials in early September that nearly 3,700 people had worked at the site during construction up to that point. Silva and other state lawmakers have said they voted for the bill without realizing its broader implications for a data center project in southern New Mexico. “State regulators, state legislators, I think, were so caught off guard at the speed at which these hyperscale data centers showed up in all of our communities almost simultaneously,” Silva said. “I would support a moratorium.”
Regulatory decisions remain pending. A public hearing on Project Jupiter’s air permit was scheduled to begin Sept. 14, but the New Mexico Supreme Court delayed it when opponents challenged the state’s approval process and the facility’s use of groundwater. The court lifted the stay last month, and New Mexico has appointed an examiner to preside over the hearing. Other legal challenges are proceeding. In Texas, El Paso Electric is still waiting for the Public Utility Commission to approve the Meta power plant; a decision could come later this year.
The companies involved have pledged mitigation. Oracle maintains that its emissions will be lower than what it sought in its air permit application and that it plans to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2031. “Oracle is committed to building Project Jupiter responsibly and incorporating community feedback into our planning,” the company said in a statement. Officials with both Oracle and Meta have said they plan to develop clean-energy projects elsewhere to offset their emissions.
Both governors have shifted their positions amid rising opposition. Last year, Lujan Grisham said Project Jupiter “reaffirms New Mexico’s leadership in global trade, advanced manufacturing, and digital infrastructure.” She has recently said she takes seriously residents’ concerns about the data center and “expects any data center operating in New Mexico to meet the state’s rigorous environmental standards and use water responsibly.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who once called the state “the epicenter of AI development,” this summer directed the Texas Public Utility Commission to ensure data center projects pay for their own infrastructure and do not raise bills for residents, recommended the Legislature pass data-center regulations next year, many concerning water and electricity use, and recently told the Texas Water Development Board to penalize data centers that do not report their water usage. Texas Democratic state Rep. Joe Moody, whose district includes parts of west and northeast El Paso, called the directives a starting point: “In the governor’s directives, we’re not talking about local control and local autonomy to make decisions on these projects. And I do think that that’s a whole other lane of conversation that we’re going to get into next session.” Abbott’s directives do not address air pollution, climate change, or the effects of a data center project in one state on another.
Shaolei Ren, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at University of California, Riverside, told El Paso Matters that even low levels of air pollutants like particulate matter and nitrogen oxides can affect communities near and downwind of the data center sites. “The health impacts can be significant for local communities,” Ren said. New Mexico’s Environment Department, which has spent months evaluating Project Jupiter’s air permit application, did not respond to emailed questions. Carlyle Group also did not respond to a request for comment.