The main lesson from DEQ’s groundwater report: Va. must budget to live within environmental limits

Virginia senators request special session to act on ’deeply alarming’ groundwater report

First for the shocking news: Just one industry – and two individual plants – have disproportionate responsibility for groundwater depletion in eastern Virginia. 

The largest single user of groundwater in the region is the Franklin paper mill owned by International Paper, drawing 15.3 million gallons of groundwater a day in 2024. Following close behind is the second largest user, Smurfit WestRock’s paper mill at West Point, which pumped 13.6 million gallons a day that same year.

Taken together, these two paper mills account for “43% of the total reported groundwater withdrawal across all aquifers and use types,” according to the DEQ. Reported groundwater withdrawals include those from municipal water systems, agriculture, and industry, but do not include residential wells, which are also a major draw on eastern Virginia’s groundwater.

Based on the EPA’s estimate that the average American consumes 82 gallons of water per day for household use, the combined groundwater withdrawn by these two industrial plants would sustain 354,000 people daily.

As another point of comparison found in the report: The third largest individual user of groundwater in Eastern Virginia is the utility that provides water to Chesapeake, which withdrew an average of four million gallons a day from the aquifer in 2024. This is several times less water than the amount withdrawn by either the Franklin or West Point paper mills, and it supplies H2O to over 250,000 Chesapeake residents, not just industry, each day.

These two industrial plants have been around for a long time. The Franklin paper mill was built in 1938 and the West Point facility first came online in 1914. They have used so much groundwater for so long that, according to the DEQ report, they have “altered the regional hydraulic gradients such that groundwater now tends to flow from the periphery inward, towards the persistent cones of depression centered on Franklin and West Point.” 

These withdrawals, along with current and historic water pumping from across the Virginia coastal plain, combine to deplete groundwater levels while increasing land subsidence and saltwater intrusion.

This isn’t good. But things used to be even worse.

The Franklin paper mill, in fact, used to withdraw twice as much water each day before it closed down in 2010. When that happened, according to the report, groundwater levels rebounded. When the mill was repurposed and reopened in 2012, the levels of water in Virginia’s coastal plain aquifer system stopped increasing, but they at least remained stable. 

Due to population growth and increasing industrial uses of water, the DEQ expects underground water levels to begin decreasing again in the near future.

This brings us to data centers. The report finds that, because underground water is limited, “it appears unlikely that a data center with evaporative cooling technology (or any comparable water user) would find a reliable, sufficient groundwater supply anywhere in the (Virginia Coastal Plain).”

DEQ study throws cold water on data center development east of I-95

But the implications for policy are much broader. The main lesson from the DEQ report is that our environment is finite. We have always known this at an abstract level. But the report makes this knowledge very concrete: There is only so much groundwater. If we go past a certain point, we damage the aquifer’s ability to store water in the future and risk contaminating drinking water supplies with salt.

The idea of a water budget is helpful. The available water in our aquifer system is like a bank account; if we manage things right, the amount we spend will be replenished by our income. 

So how do we want to allocate our limited funds? Do we really want to use a disproportionate amount of our precious water on two paper mills, one making absorbent paper fluff for diapers (the Franklin mill), the other making kraft paper for packaging (the West Point facility)?

The budget idea is also useful for data center and energy policy. Some hyperscale data centers use huge amounts of water for evaporative cooling, but not all do because there are different ways to cool the technology. Each and every data center campus is, however, a massive electricity hog.

Just as one paper mill can use as much water as tens of thousands of people, a single large data center campus can use as much electricity as all the households in a small city, or even a small state. For this reason, we must not only budget for water, we must also budget for carbon.

More than half of electricity consumed in Virginia comes from fossil fuels, mostly natural gas, which produces carbon dioxide when burned. But there is a finite amount of our shared atmosphere that we can fill with carbon before it pushes us into very dangerous levels of global warming.

If we only have so much carbon that we can “spend,” we as Virginians and as a nation must make wise decisions about energy use. Ever-increasing numbers of new data centers will surely break the bank.

We here in Virginia can have very good lives while remaining within environmental limits, but we can’t have everything. Maybe we can find alternative ways to make diapers and use less packaging in order to preserve our aquifers and more judiciously use water resources? Maybe Virginia doesn’t need any more data centers beyond those already being built?

Environmental science, like that found in the DEQ’s eastern Virginia groundwater report, can inform us of how close we are to exceeding environmental limits. But Virginia’s state lawmakers, along with an informed and active public, will determine whether or not we live within those bounds.

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