Bessemer, AL data center would use 2 million gallons of water a day

The Warrior River Water Authority says it cannot supply that volume and continue to supply its current customers. That amounts to one third of its daily water supply, and the two million gallons doesn't appear to be a firm projection, it could very well be higher.

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Publicly available information suggests that the Warrior River Water Authority’s supply capacity is around 6 million gallons per day. Usage of 2 million gallons per day, then, would amount to a third of the utility’s water supply if capacity is not increased to accommodate the facility. 

The 2 million gallons of water a day requested by the developer is equivalent to the typical usage of around 6,700 households, about two-thirds of Bessemer’s entire population, based on the water utility’s consumption estimates. 

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The project’s total water usage remains a mystery. A regulatory filing by county officials estimated that the site would consume up to two billion gallons of water per day. Meanwhile, reports surfaced Saturday that Logistic had requested two million gallons of water per day for the project, a figure 1000 times smaller than the county estimate. A smaller data center in Jackson County, Alabama uses more than 182 million gallons of water per day.

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This is reported to be a 700 acre project encompassing 18 buildings, all bigger than the average Walmart. The people involved will also not acknowledge the end user/owner of the data center, it is currently under a company called Logistic Land Investment. All city council members have signed non-disclosure agreements, and there are a whole lot of unanswered questions around this.

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Public officials in Bessemer, including its mayor and city attorney, have confirmed they’ve signed non-disclosure agreements related to the project, limiting the amount of information available to residents about the proposal.

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Frustrations about the project’s lack of transparency were not just limited to county residents. Jefferson County Commission President Jimmy Stephens told the city’s planning and zoning commission in June that he had not been informed about the project.

“No one has,” he said. “The way I found out about this project was through the news media. Normally we were in the loop, in this particular incident we weren’t.”

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