Virginia's Department of Environmental Quality issued the final VPDES permit, the Virginia Pollutant Discharge Elimination System licence governing water discharges, for Amazon's Lake Anna campus, effective 1 August. The permit clears 0.28 million gallons a day (MGD) of cooling water into Sedges Creek and requires no testing for PFAS, the per- and polyfluoroalkyl 'forever chemicals' that resist breakdown in water and tissue.1
Amazon applied to discharge into the creek on 1 June, and residents fought the plan through a contested June hearing, pressing the regulator on the missing PFAS requirement. Virginia DEQ issued the licence anyway, effective at the start of August.
This permit is the same kind of infrastructure chokepoint that stopped Project Jupiter's pipeline, and it broke the opposite way. New Mexico's land commissioner held title to the corridor and a greenhouse-gas case, two independent reasons to refuse. Virginia DEQ, with no PFAS rule to invoke and no discretion over the campus itself, had neither. Objection alone does not create a legal ground to refuse, and without one the regulator had nothing to withhold.
