Water supply & consumptive use
How much water the project consumes, against the receiving water's own cited low flows.
A real impact study states how much water Van Wert Mega Site consumes at buildout. It sets that figure against the Town Creek's own cited design low flows, which are the drought floors a permit writer screens every discharge against. This chapter reports as much of that comparison as the record supports. It names what it cannot compute.
Cooling methodclosed-loop dry / air-cooled (“closed loop”) [reference] an operator claim — a claim is not an instrument
Claim vs record · the cooling-cycling reconciliation
Van Wert Mega Site claims closed-loop dry / air-cooled (“closed loop”) [reference] Gap
No metered makeup or blowdown for Van Wert Mega Site to test the closed_loop_dry claim (source=reference) — an [open] gap, not 'confirmed dry'. The operator DISCLOSES an UNVERIFIED ongoing draw of 0.0018 MGD, consistent with a dry loop at screening scale — either way a single-source self-report (not a metered instrument), so it neither corroborates nor re-archetypes the claim and cannot upgrade the [reference] pin; the claim's 'once operational' wording also excludes the initial closed-loop fill (a City-approved one-time withdrawal of undisclosed volume) — the specific open quantity (→ C2 records request #1688). Keep the pin [reference]. Neither corroborator is on record for Van Wert Mega Site (air permit + Tier II) — both are C2 records-request items, not read as confirming the claim.
The records that would test it [open]
- initial closed-loop fill volume + top-off / make-up rate (the fill-vs-annual figure)
- metered water-service use (actual makeup withdrawal vs the disclosed ongoing draw)
- executed water & sewer service agreement (the City-approved fill authorization — the instrument, not a press summary)
- cooling-tower blowdown / low-volume-wastewater discharge record — a facility-own INDIVIDUAL NPDES permit + DMR on a direct-discharge path, or the industrial-user (IU) / pretreatment permit + sewer-use agreement on a sanitary-sewer route (OHD000001 was WITHDRAWN 2026-07-21; no general-permit coverage will ever exist)
- facility air permit (PTI/PTIO) — cooling-tower emission-unit list + PM drift limits
- Tier II / EPCRA-312 chemical inventory — cooling-water treatment (biocide, scale / corrosion inhibitor)
Holder: City / municipal water-sewer authority serving van-wert; Ohio EPA (INDIVIDUAL NPDES — OHD000001 withdrawn 2026-07-21, no general permit to seek); Ohio EPA / regional air agency (DAPC); SERC / LEPC
Corroborators · secondary, never the outcome air permit · silent · Tier II chemistry · silentNeither corroborator is on record for Van Wert Mega Site (air permit + Tier II) — both are C2 records-request items, not read as confirming the claim.
[reference] operator/developer claim (NOT instrument-confirmed): closed-loop cooling (Danfoss-patented equipment); QTS states the campus 'does not consume water for cooling once operational', characterizing ongoing use as 'about what 4 households use per month' (q.com/data-centers/van-wert; vanwert.org/water-treatment). Same closed-loop pattern that undercut the Urbana water thesis (#1327). Carries an [open] discrepancy on the initial closed-loop fill (~660,000 gal from the City of Van Wert — local press frames it 'annually' while the 2026-06-11 event framed it as a one-time fill); reconciling the fill volume + the still-negotiated water/sewer service agreement is the water-service instrument (#1407) / water-contradiction lead (#1409), not this pin. B2 (#1682) ran the A3 cooling-cycling reconciliation harness (`watermark cooling-reconcile`) on this claim: with no metered makeup (A1 built no Van Wert County withdrawal) and no facility-own blowdown (A2: OHD000001 was WITHDRAWN 2026-07-21, Ohio EPA declined to finalize it, so no general-permit coverage will ever exist), the outcome is a `gap` that KEEPS this [reference] pin — the ~660k gal figure is a single-source self-report, not an instrument, so it can neither upgrade the source nor re-archetype; the initial-fill open quantity is sharpened into a C2 records request (#1688/#1409). Replace with a documented cooling design when an NPDES/mechanical instrument lands — which, with OHD000001 withdrawn, means an INDIVIDUAL NPDES permit on the direct-discharge path, or the City industrial-pretreatment (IU) permit / sewer-use agreement if it blows down to sewer (#1408). AN NPDES INSTRUMENT DID LAND ON 2026-07-30 AND IT IS NOT THAT ONE. Coverage 2GC08872*AG under general permit OHC000006 is CONSTRUCTION-SITE STORMWATER: it authorizes runoff from 792 ac of land disturbance, expires 2028-04-22, and documents no cooling system, no process discharge and no operating water use whatsoever. It leaves this archetype exactly where it was — the operator's [reference] claim. Do not let a permit number matching 'NPDES' upgrade the cooling grade. The fill discrepancy also WIDENED on the City instruments (#1401): the ~660,000 gal 'one-time' figure (Safety-Service Director, 2026-04-21) sits against 700,000 gal that 'will last 6 to 8 years' (a County Commissioner) and 5,500 gal (the since-lost FAQ) — and six days after his own press release the same director told Council the City 'would be incapable' of supplying the fill water. He also said facility water goes to the WWTP 'not ... town creek', which the WWTP's own permit contradicts: 2PD00006 discharges to Town Creek (#1406).
- The harness recommends; it never mutates the pinned cooling model — re-archetyping is a reviewed edit with the instrument cited.
- A back-solved cycles-of-concentration is an [inference] bracket, never a headline scalar.
- A gap (no documented makeup or blowdown) is an [open] records-request lead — never read as 'confirmed dry'.
- A reservation ceiling (a will-serve / water-agreement figure) is not a discharge/withdrawal instrument — it keeps the archetype pin and is never collapsed into a headline consumptive figure.
- A reservation conflict survives a blind route: a negotiated ceiling is not something the withdrawal or discharge instruments could ever have metered, so blinding them cannot erase it — and where the operator's own figure conflicts with that reservation, the two are separated by provenance and not by size, with the conflict reported rather than resolved.
- An operator self-report lands on its own disclosed_* slot, never on documented_*, and cannot upgrade the claim's source.
- An instrument that cannot reach a facility returns an absence of jurisdiction, not a measurement — a municipally-supplied, sewer-discharging campus reads ~0 in the withdrawal registry and the discharge record by construction, and that ~0 never corroborates a claim.
- A documented withdrawal that is not the cooling account (construction-phase water) is kept on its own slot, and a prediction the harness could not derive is shown as refused, never as zero.
- Where the facility is invisible to the withdrawal registry but its municipal supplier is not, the system's reported withdrawal is the supplier's account — a total across every customer, carried as the denominator the claim has to be read against, never as the facility's own water.
- The corroborators (air-permit PM, Tier II chemistry) are secondary — recorded and reconciled against the claim, never the sole basis for a re-archetype and never changing the outcome.
data/reference/oepa/cooling-reconciliation.yaml — regenerate: watermark cooling-reconcile --write · reconciled as of 2026-07-21
baseline
Current municipal loop, no data-center cooling draw.
buildout
Data-center campus cooling draw (closed_loop_dry) on the municipal supply.
- The draw is set against the receiving water's cited design low flow as a worst-case, basin-scale bound — a screening comparison, not a withdrawal claim.
The record behind this chapter
What this chapter stands on: the records it reads, the inputs its modeled figures rest
on, and the reference data behind its baselines — the same pages the record screens
serve, not a second copy. A figure the record does not support stays [open] and links nothing.
- 2PD00006.fs.pdfOhio EPA
- Van Wert Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP)Permits
- QTS Data CenterPermits
- Permits6 records