Water, Power, and the Rural Bill: What Terafab Will Ask of the Land

At the August meeting, SpaceX representatives told Grimes County that Terafab will not raise electricity bills for other ratepayers, will not deplete local water, and will not dry up the Navasota River, because the company will draw water from the Gibbons Creek Reservoir rather than local groundwater and build its own natural-gas-fired power plants rather than lean on the ERCOT grid in a cost-shifting way. Those are meaningful commitments. They are also company representations that the permits, contracts, and engineering studies have not yet been published to confirm.

Water: a reservoir, not an answer

Gibbons Creek Reservoir once cooled a coal plant that closed in 2018, and routing industrial demand there instead of to aquifers responds directly to a community already uneasy about water. But the pledge to use the reservoir does not answer how much water Terafab will consume. A combined semiconductor-and-AI campus can draw large volumes for ultrapure-water production, cooling, blowdown, fire protection, and wastewater handling, and the company has described on-site wastewater treatment and water reuse without publishing rates.

The Texas Tribune has reported that the state lacks complete public data on data centers' water demand and cooling design, and cited a University of Texas at Austin estimate that data centers could grow from under 1 percent of Texas water use today to between 3 and 9 percent by 2040. Against that backdrop, the operative figures for Terafab — withdrawal versus consumption, peak-day demand, the reservoir's legally available volume and water-rights holder, drought rules, and downstream effects on the Navasota — remain the records to obtain.

Power: private generation, public exposure

Self-supplied power is a real difference from the data centers now straining ERCOT, but it does not remove the project from public-interest scrutiny. The Texas Tribune has reported 32 proposed gas-fired plants in Texas intended to serve data centers, part of at least 74 such direct-to-data-center plants of 100 megawatts or more planned nationally, which the cited analysis projects could emit a combined 287 million tons of carbon dioxide over their operating lives. Texas grid rules now require large new users to post $50,000 per megawatt before an interconnection study and to show site control — a measure meant to filter speculative demand.

For Terafab, the load and emissions picture is still unpublished: the megawatts the fab, packaging lines, AI operations, and cooling will require; whether the gas units are combined- or simple-cycle; who owns the plants and pipelines; whether the campus touches ERCOT for backup or ancillary services; the proposed battery capacity and its fire-safety plan; and the full inventory of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulates, and methane.

The rest of the footprint

The county agreement assigns SpaceX responsibility for repairing material road damage from construction, for on-site security and fire and emergency response, and for building an ambulance bay for county operation, along with a 500-foot setback from homes, churches, and schools and controls on noise and lighting. Each of those provisions turns on definitions and enforcement — what counts as "material" road damage, who staffs and funds recurring emergency services, and how tonal and nighttime noise is measured — that the executed contracts and permits will decide.

The open questions

• How much water will Terafab withdraw and consume at peak, from what legally available reservoir volume, and with what effect on the Navasota River and other reservoir users?
• How many megawatts will the campus need, how much gas generation and battery storage will serve it, and what will it emit?
• If the plants are private and the site avoids ERCOT cost-shifting, who still pays for substations, pipelines, roads, and emergency response?
• Are the water-reuse, closed-loop, and "no groundwater" claims backed by discharge permits and engineering studies, or are they commitments still to be documented?

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