Many MindedFederal gas pipeline review for Meta's Louisiana data center lands in January
FERC announced it will prepare an environmental assessment under NEPA for Entergy's gas pipeline serving Meta's Hyperion data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana. The agency said the assessment will come out in early January 2027, and it ordered federal agencies to finish any remaining authorization decisions by April. Heatmap's Jael Holzman reported the item in a weekly roundup of development fights.
The Sierra Club filed comments asking for a full environmental impact statement instead. It wants the review to cover the data center's own environmental impacts and the cumulative impacts, arguing that the power stations and the data center are directly linked to the pipeline. Meanwhile, the gas power plants for the site have been under construction for nearly a year, after state regulators approved them. Sierra Club managing attorney Eric Huber said the group is in wait-and-see mode and will decide its next steps once the assessment is out. Meta and Entergy did not respond to a request for comment.
This matters for energy because the cost and timing of power for large digital loads is now set partly by pipeline permits. A federal review that arrives after the plants are being built shows how fuel supply, not just generation, can become the gating step. If the assessment is challenged, delay could add cost and uncertainty to compute-heavy services. A similar dispute is brewing over the Green Chile pipeline in New Mexico, tied to Oracle and OpenAI's Project Jupiter, and it may lead to litigation.
Watch for the January assessment, whether the Sierra Club sues, and the April authorization deadline. The source also covers local data center fights in South Carolina, but its text is cut off in that section. Calling the Meta fight controversial or high-stakes is the author's opinion.
Source: Heatmap