Parties ask hearing officer to vacate Jupiter air-permit hearing

Yucca Growth Infrastructure and the New Mexico Environment Department Air Quality Bureau asked the hearing officer on Nov. 3 to vacate the Dec. 7 public hearing on Yucca Growth's air-quality permit for a fuel-cell plant that would power a nearby data center, according to the Environment Department's hearing notice, and to clear the pre-hearing deadlines tied to that date. Nothing has been granted. The Dec. 7 setting and the Nov. 23 permit-decision deadline still stand until an order changes them.

The joint motion, in Air Quality Bureau docket 26-57(P), covers Application No. 10883. Yucca Growth said it revised the application in October. The department said it needed more time after the Nov. 3 newspaper-notice cutoff to finish its technical review of those revisions, so it could not meet the notice rules for a Dec. 7 hearing.

Yucca Growth also waived the statutory decision deadline on the application under Section 74-2-7(B)(2)(a) of the state Air Quality Control Act and Section 20.2.72.207(B)–(C) of the state's air-permit rules. The joint filers asked that no new hearing date be set until the Air Quality Bureau puts a revised recommendation into the administrative record. If that recommendation is to issue a permit, they said it must include an amended draft permit, a statement of basis and a modeling report. No amended draft permit appears on the docket yet.

Nicholas R. Maxwell, an intervenor representing himself, in a Nov. 4 response, said he does not oppose vacating Dec. 7 or holding off on a reschedule until the bureau files that revised package. He opposed treating Yucca Growth's waiver as an indefinite substitute for the statute's decision and extension rules.

The extended permit-decision date on the record is Nov. 23, after Secretary James C. Kenney on July 1 granted a 90-day extension from an earlier deadline. Maxwell asked the hearing officer to send a further good-cause extension request to the secretary or a designee before Nov. 23, for up to 90 more days past that date, and to set a status conference in the first week of December without picking a replacement hearing date.

New Energy Economy renewed its motion to dismiss the application without prejudice on Nov. 4 and opposed vacating the hearing unless the case is also dismissed. The group said the department has acknowledged it cannot finish a revised draft permit and give the legally required public notice before Dec. 7, and that Yucca Growth has repeatedly changed the facility's configuration and emissions assumptions. New Energy Economy's filing describes the proposed plant as about 2.46 gigawatts of methane-fueled generation tied to Project Jupiter. The Center for Biological Diversity, Vivian Fuller, Jose Saldaña Jr. and Bruce Wetherbee support that renewed dismissal motion, the filing says; Maxwell took no position on it.

The Office of Public Facilitation on Nov. 4 noticed a Cisco Webex hearing on the outstanding motions, including the joint vacate request, Maxwell's response and extension motion, the bureau's witness-disclosure motions, and New Energy Economy's renewed dismissal bid. The notice says the hearing clerk emailed the link to parties that afternoon. The filed notice gives no date or time for that hearing.

Until the hearing officer or the secretary acts, the Second Amended Scheduling Order's Dec. 7 evidentiary hearing and the related testimony and notice deadlines remain on the books.

The data-center description is from the Environment Department's Amended Notice of Hearing in Air Quality Bureau docket 26-57(P), filed Aug. 12, 2026, under Brief Description of Permit Application: https://www.env.nm.gov/opf/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2026/07/2026-08-12-AQB-26-57-Amended-Notice-of-Hearing-English-filed.pdf