California company wants to use Arizona groundwater to make 'green hydrogen' fuel. Residents say it'll drain their wells

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https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environment/2024/02/05/brenda-arizona-residents-question-heliogen-green-hydrogen-project/72241708007/

BRENDA, Arizona — A clean energy company wants federal permission to use Arizona's sunshine and water to create carbon-free hydrogen fuel in one of the state’s more stressed rural groundwater basins.

Heliogen, a Southern California-based company, last year won the exclusive right to lease more than 3,300 acres of desert east of this small community in western Arizona’s La Paz County for solar energy development. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management had offered the land as one of three designated solar zones in the state, this one just north of Interstate 10 and about 100 miles west of Phoenix

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Data from wells that the Arizona Department of Water Resources monitors show all areas of the basin in decline over the last 20 years, and many by dozens of feet. For instance, at the routinely checked well nearest to the proposed solar hydrogen field, depth to water has increased by more than 20 feet since 2003, with each year’s reading adding a point along a relatively straight line downward on the well’s depth chart.

Near the basin’s most intensive farm pumping farther east, Department of Water Resources chief hydrologist Ryan Mitchell said, land has subsided 25 centimeters, or nearly 10 inches, since 2010.