Oracle has revived its attempt to secure approval for a natural gas pipeline extension feeding Project Jupiter, its 2.5GW data centre campus in Dona Ana County, New Mexico, Datacenter Dynamics reported, citing Bloomberg. The company asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to expedite approval of the 17.8 mile Green Chile pipeline, which would move about 400 million cubic feet of gas a day to on site fuel cells supplied by Bloom Energy.
In a letter to FERC, Oracle said the development is projected to support nearly 5,800 peak construction jobs and generate up to 1.1 billion dollars in annual economic output for the county. The federal route follows a state level rejection: in July, state regulators turned down Energy Transfer’s application for a pipeline to the site, citing large scale water use, increased carbon emissions and a lack of state revenue generation.
The schedule pressure is documented. Oracle said after the July rejection that the project remained on schedule, but in September it was reported to have sent a force majeure notice to Blue Owl Capital to shield itself from increased costs if the facility fails to come online in 2028 as planned. The pipeline’s operational timeline has slipped to February 2027, past its August target. Environmental groups and New Mexico’s attorney general Raul Torrez have pressed FERC to broaden its environmental review to cover the combined footprint of the data centre and the pipeline, and recent reports say Oracle has been trucking compressed natural gas to data centres in Salt Lake City and Texas for the past year and is considering the same workaround for Jupiter.