As the use of artificial intelligence grows, the demand for the data centers that power AI is growing, too. Now, a proposal in its very early stages would bring a data center to Kalkaska.
Matt Rine, a geologist running a carbon capture company, has been working with local officials to develop a plan to build a data center that would combine data storage, power generation, and carbon sequestration all in one place.
Rine approached the Kalkaska Downtown Development Authority a few months ago, making a pitch to them that Kalkaska was the best site in northern Michigan for a data center that could bring hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars in local tax revenue.
“He was using GIS mapping to narrow down sites that would be possibilities,” said Cash Cook, president of the Kalkaska DDA.
According to Rine, Kalkaska has the right combination of factors needed for a data center: a nearby high-voltage power line, existing fiber infrastructure, gas storage fields, and open land. And on top of that, an oil boom in the late 1900s left behind hundreds of nearby wells where carbon emissions from a data center could be pumped back underground.
Rine said the project is in “phase 0.5, very early.”
“We don't have a data center developer, the end user, picked, or even a power producer that would build the natural gas plant picked,” he said. “We wanted to start with local support to see if it's something that [Kalkaska] wanted.”
Carbon capture and data centers
Data centers require massive amounts of energy. In other parts of the United States that adopted data centers early on, the projects crippled existing electric grids. Now, many new data center proposals have entire power plants on-site.
“There aren't that many new power plants being built, except at data centers,” said Cook.
That meant Rine, who works on carbon capture and storage at oil and gas wells, was keeping track of data center development across the country and the energy needs they will have in the future.
His plan is to design this data center project with built-in carbon capture and storage. Rine’s company, Rocklocker, is a subsidiary of ReefWorks based in Traverse City, which operates oil and gas wells throughout northern Michigan from Grayling to Manistee.
Rocklocker focuses on carbon sequestration, injecting carbon emissions back into ground, particularly into abandoned oil wells along the Antrim Shale.
Kalkaska officials eye jobs and tax revenue
The Kalkaska County Commission approved an official letter of support for the project back in March.
Its letter stated, “Kalkaska County welcomes the opportunity as it will serve as a catalyst for both economic and job growth within our community,” listing high paying jobs, opportunities for training local residents in skilled labor in fields like computer science and engineering, construction jobs, and growing the local tax base.
The jobs, in theory, would come from all three parts of the proposed project — the data center, the power plant, and the carbon sequestration system. The exact numbers depend on how big the plant is.
Cook, at the DDA, has done the math on how much this could bring in for local services.
“We're talking about revenue for this county and township hovering annually around $35 million,” he said. Ultimately, that would depend on the size and scale of the center.
He said Kalkaska’s Council on Aging, library, and road commission are all underfunded. They struggle to afford things like arts and culture programming. He said some services could have their budgets doubled.
“If we get a backbone industry where we can get tax revenue to be able to afford those kinds of things,” he said, “if used judiciously by the local government, we can create an absolutely amazing community here.”
Water consumption concerns in the Great Lakes region
Data centers already guzzle hundreds of billions of gallons of water annually across the country, and many environmental advocates in the Great Lakes have raised alarm bells that the region is particularly attractive to data center developers because of its cool temperatures and abundant freshwater.
Rine’s vision for this data center involves a closed-loop system that re-uses water — either groundwater from a well or brine released by natural gas drilling — for cooling.
“Computers generate heat,” he said. “All the water is doing is transferring that heat, and then you can run it back underground, cool it off, and then come back around in a closed loop system.”
This is a newer way of designing data centers. Past designs have required constantly pulling from municipal water supply, sometimes on the scale of millions of gallons per day. Depending on local laws, companies often are not required to disclose how much water they consume or plan to consume.
An Alliance for the Great Lakes report on managing the water needs of data centers says closed-loop systems that re-circulate water are more complicated to develop, and that “how that technology will reduce both water and electricity usage remains to be seen.”
In Wisconsin, Microsoft recently disclosed after a lawsuit that a data center currently in development would likely require 8.4 million gallons of water per year, using a closed-loop system, like the one Rine hopes for in Kalkaska, to power a campus of data centers.
Possible sites
Rine is exploring both private and public land as options for where to propose a data center. He said the project would require anywhere from a couple hundred to a thousand acres, depending on the scale of the center.
He has identified a few parcels of land belonging to the Department of Natural Resources, which comprises a majority of the land in Kalkaska County. Siting the project on that land would require a DNR land sale or a land swap.
Cook, of the DDA, said those involved in initial research had identified two properties in particular — one east of the village and one southeast, but both in Kalkaska Township — that “have no structures, no wetlands [and] no rivers,” and are not on the North Country or the Shore-to-Shore trails.
Seeking community input
“We're not looking to have any commitments from any data center developers or end users until we have a project that the community wants and they're ready to offer it,” said Rine.
He’s presented at multiple township meetings and county board meetings, at the local conservation district, and plans to address the school board.
In June, Kalkaska Township approved a memorandum of understanding allowing Rine to move forward with “Data Center development research within Kalkaska Township.”
Rine said in early discussions, he heard concerns over air quality and water quality and consumption.
“We've reached out to some of the data center developers, asked how they've addressed those issues, and how they're addressing water use and air quality,” he explained, in order to present those answers to the community.
Rine said he hopes to organize public meetings at Kalkaska High School in the coming months.
“We have the ability with Kalkaska, with the community, to outline what they want [the data center] to look like and what their requirements are, before we go to the data center developer and say, here's what the community wants, here's the community benefits plan,” Rine said, “And then [they] take it or leave it.”
