Stratos Data Center - Natural Gas Supply/Usage
At full build, we have been told the Stratos data center project in Box Elder County will require 9 Gigawatts of power to operate. Generators would require between 1.5 & 2.3 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day at that power output. MIDA and O'Leary claim the Stratos data center will use a "closed loop" system, requiring water to be cooled as it is cycled through.
The Ruby natural gas pipeline runs west to east 600+ miles from Wyoming to Oregon, through the Hansel Valley adjacent to the proposed Stratos site. Based on a web search, the capacity of the Ruby pipeline is 1.5 Billion cubic feet per day. This is minimum amount of natural gas needed to run the Stratos data center at full buildout based on my research.
There have been a few twists and turns since the pipeline became operational in 2011. The original owner filed for bankruptcy in 2022, when Tallgrass Energy purchased the pipeline assets and began operating it. It appears the Ruby pipeline is running at only 50% capacity currently. Apparently, Tallgrass has been "shopping" excess capacity to prospective data centers along the route, including Stratos/O'Leary.
A few questions I have:
Does the 9 GW of power required to run the data center include or exclude the extra power required for cooling the water in the closed loop system? What does that look like?
If the Ruby pipeline has a max capacity of 1.5 Billion FT3 of NG per day and half of that is already flowing through to Oregon, where is the remaining gas going to come from for the Stratos project?
The law of supply and demand is going to come into play once this data center (if approved) begins ramping up. What do anticipated natural gas rate increases start to look like year 1-10 for the intermountain west, and the west coast?