A Sonoran Think Tank technical brief, prepared in support of the Vineland community’s regulatory pushback.
This month, the Sonoran Think Tank published a technical rebuttal of the Environmental Impact Statement filed for the DataOne hyperscale data center proposed in Vineland, New Jersey. The work was prepared at the request of residents and local advocates who have been raising substantive concerns about the project, the air emissions it would generate, and the water claims attached to it. The community asked for an independent engineering review of what the applicant has on file with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. This brief reports what the documents say, and what the first principles say about them.
The headline claim in the EIS is that the facility will be water positive. The applicant asserts the project will return more water to the Kirkwood/Cohansey aquifer than it withdraws. This is an unusual claim for a hyperscale data center. International Energy Agency benchmarks place a typical 100 MW hyperscale facility at roughly 2 million liters of water consumed daily. The Green Grid’s Water Usage Effectiveness metric defines an ideal value of zero and makes no provision for negative values under standard operational architectures. A water positive claim, therefore, requires extraordinary engineering evidence. The EIS does not provide it.
Based on combustion chemistry, 27 Bergen B35:40V20AG natural gas reciprocating engines operating continuously will produce approximately 26,600 gallons of water vapor per hour as a stoichiometric byproduct of methane combustion. That figure is a chemical identity and is not in dispute. The question is how much of that vapor becomes recoverable liquid water. The EIS does not provide a mass balance, a condensate collection design, a treatment system, a contamination profile, or a volume figure in gallons per hour. The claim rests on a narrative description of heat exchangers, wet scrubbers, and a proprietary system called SYKLEA, without engineering numbers attached.
The cooling architecture has a similar problem. The proposed facility has a 350 MW IT load that must be removed mechanically. The absorption chiller system described in the EIS, under best-case conditions with evaporative heat rejection, can cover approximately 56 percent of that load. Under the dry fin cooler configuration identified by the applicant’s own consultant, AKRF, for the Mega Bay units, peak summer performance drops to roughly 29 to 32 percent. That leaves 150 to 250 MW of IT cooling demand unaddressed by any mechanical system named in the document. No supplemental cooling system of any kind, capacity, water consumption, or heat rejection methodology appears anywhere in the application. A water balance cannot be completed without that information, and a water positive claim cannot be evaluated without that balance.
The technology that underlies both the emissions and water claims is SYKLEA. The EIS attributes a 99.8 percent NOx reduction to the combined SCR and SYKLEA treatment train. The EPA’s New Source Performance Standards for stationary spark-ignition internal combustion engines establish a demonstrated SCR performance of 80 to 95 percent. No EPA-certified control technology for natural gas reciprocating engines achieves 99.8 percent as of March 2026. The incremental performance attributed to SYKLEA is not supported by emission performance test data, a continuous emissions monitoring specification, a vendor performance guarantee, or third-party verification.
SYKLEA’s own engineering documentation introduces a more serious problem. The EIS states that the biofiltration stage removes carbon dioxide, with algal photosynthetic fixation as the biological mechanism. SYKLEA’s process design for the ALIUM GAS unit states explicitly that the biofiltration stage treats residual carbon monoxide, not carbon dioxide. The vendor and the applicant are describing two different chemistries. Because photosynthetic CO₂ fixation is the stated biological mechanism underlying the water-positive claim, this contradiction undermines the narrative at its foundation.
Several physical realities reinforce the problem. Algae require 20 to 30 degrees Celsius to sustain photosynthesis. Engine exhaust enters the treatment train at 400-500 °C. Algae are killed by direct contact with untreated flue gas at the NOx concentrations present in the post SCR stream. Photosynthesis is light-dependent, and the facility operates twenty-four hours a day, which means a continuous CO₂ fixation claim requires an unquantified artificial lighting system that the EIS does not describe. Based on peer-reviewed techno-economic data, the published photobioreactor area required to capture the facility’s CO₂ output is approximately 82 times the entire 103-acre project site. The EIS site plan shows the SYKLEA installation as a narrow strip along the eastern perimeter, perhaps one acre in area. The compression factor required to reconcile those numbers is not disclosed.
SYKLEA also markets its system under a “NoWater Technology” designation, referring to a closed-loop architecture that produces no net liquid discharge. That is the opposite of producing recoverable condensate. The EIS attributes water recovery to “the wet scrubber and SYKLEA exhaust gas treatment systems” jointly, without identifying which component produces the claimed volume. The vendor’s own materials and the applicant’s narrative point in opposite directions, and the EIS does not resolve the contradiction. SYKLEA is also listed among the contributors who prepared the EIS, which creates a conflict of interest that warrants heightened scrutiny of every claim tied to its performance.
The applicant’s own air quality modeling, prepared by AKRF using a methodology approved by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, reports a long-term non-cancer acrolein hazard quotient of 2.06 at the maximum overall receptor. The threshold is 1.0. This is a documented exceedance of a hazardous air pollutant in the permit record, using the state’s preferred meteorological data and dispersion methodology. It creates an independent regulatory obligation that exists separately from anything in the rebuttal. NJDEP had already issued an Administrative Notice of Deficiency on this application on December 18, 2025.
Several material waste streams and chemical storage obligations are also absent from the EIS. The SYKLEA process generates roughly 32,400 kilograms per day of biosludge across the engine fleet, a nitrate- and VOC-bearing liquid effluent stream from the ALIUM AQ stage, and requires continuous on-site storage of industrial-concentration hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide at that concentration triggers Tier II reporting under the federal Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act and risk management plan obligations under New Jersey’s Toxic Catastrophe Prevention Act. None of these streams or storage obligations is classified, sized, or permitted in the EIS.
The community pushback in Vineland has been organized, persistent, and substantive. This analysis is one input among several. The point is not to argue against the project on principle. The point is that the documents on file do not yet support the applicant’s claims regarding water, emissions, or pollution control. Reviewing authorities should require a complete water mass balance with engineering calculations, identification of any verified real-world SYKLEA deployment on engine exhaust, full engineering specifications for the biofiltration system, and a recalculation of NAAQS compliance using only EPA-demonstrated control efficiencies until SYKLEA performance is independently verified. That is the standard the regulations already call for. The Vineland record does not yet meet it.
The full technical rebuttal, including stoichiometric calculations, citation framework, and a complete deficiency table, is available at this link:
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.