This piece is part of MTFP’s 2026 poll week, where we’re exploring data on how Montana voters feel about their elected officials, environmental concerns, immigration enforcement and other issues.

A majority of Montanans believe there is the right amount of federal land in the state, according to a recent poll conducted by Montana Free Press in coordination with Rutgers University.

About one quarter of respondents, 24%, said there was too much federal land in the state, compared to 21% who said there was too little. 

Additionally, despite the fact that federal land transfer appears in both the state and national GOP party platforms, a majority of Republicans polled, 62%, said there is the right amount or too little federal land in Montana. About 96% of Democrats and 81% of independents also said they feel that way.

Melissa Weddell, a professor who studies recreation and tourism at the University of Montana, said she’s not surprised that the MTFP-Eagleton poll demonstrates bipartisan support for federal lands — even though Montanans occasionally express frustration with the way federal agencies manage natural resources and growing numbers of recreational users.

“They are where anyone can go. They can go for free. They can see people of all different sizes and colors and backgrounds. It really is a phenomenal system,” Weddell said. “They are the foundation of democracy.”

Montanans’ keen engagement with public land issues could be explained, at least partially, by their regular use of federal land. Polling conducted by Colorado College last year as part of its State of the Rockies initiative found that Montanans are more likely to report regular use of national public lands than residents of the seven other Western states polled. 

Nearly 30% of Montanans, according to the Colorado College poll, reported visiting public land more than 20 times over the previous year, while just 8% of Montanans said they hadn’t made any visits in the last year to a national public land, such as a national park, national forest, national monument or national wildlife refuge.

Federal agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service oversee about one-third of the land in Montana. Congressional negotiations over federal land ownership and management played prominent roles in last year’s debate over President Trump’s massive spending package. The issue also featured in Montana lawmakers’ 2025 discussion of a failed resolution to support Utah in a land-ownership fight that state has pending in the federal court system. 

U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, made multiple attempts to include a proposal to transfer Bureau of Land Management holdings out of the federal estate in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the multi-trillion-dollar budget package that made sweeping changes to federal tax, health care and natural resource policies. But the bill garnered the necessary votes to pass both chambers only after the land-sale amendments were stripped from the final package. 

The land transfer issue cast Montana’s federal delegation into the national spotlight. U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke, who represents Montana’s Western District in Congress, staked out an early position against land sales, declaring the issue his “San Juan Hill.” Other Western Republicans followed suit, asserting they would not vote for Trump’s megabill with the land sale provision in it. Zinke’s colleague in the Senate, Steve Daines, took a different approach. He negotiated with Lee when the bill was before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to ensure that federal lands in Montana would be barred from sale.

Public land transfer advocates like Lee argue that there is too much land in the federal estate, particularly in states such as Utah and Nevada, where the BLM is the state’s largest land manager. They often also argue that federal agencies mismanage the land and that state governments are more responsive to local recreational and commercial users. 

Those who support keeping federal land under the umbrella of federal land managers argue that transferring ownership to the state government opens the door to the eventual sale of that land to private individuals and corporations. They also maintain that state agencies don’t have the budget to cover high-dollar expenditures for wildfire suppression, a dynamic that they say could produce financial pressures to sell public lands to private owners.

State lawmakers also contemplated federal land ownership when the legislature was in session last year. Two-thirds of legislators in the Montana House of Representatives voted down a resolution that sought to support Utah in its legal attempt to wrest control of 18.5 million acres of Bureau of Land Management-administered federal land. House Democrats were united in their opposition to that bill, which garnered the support of a majority of the body’s 58 Republicans.

The U.S. Forest Service is the largest single landowner in Montana by acreage. It manages 17 million acres of land in the state, as compared to 8 million acres under Bureau of Land Management control and 1 million acres of National Park Service holdings.

The MTFP-Eagleton poll surveyed 801 registered voters through telephone interviews and text-to-web questionnaires. Data was collected from Dec. 23, 2025 to Jan. 3, 2026. The poll, which was weighted to reflect the demographics of the state’s voters, has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.

This piece is part of the Montana Insights project, which is commissioning rounds of polling to help MTFP readers understand public sentiment on key Montana policy issues. Further findings from the Dec. 2025-Jan. 2026 poll are available here.

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This piece is part of MTFP’s 2026 poll week, where we’re exploring data on how Montana voters feel about their elected officials, environmental concerns, immigration enforcement and other issues.

Montanans are bullish on solar, natural gas and hydropower for electricity generation — but wary of adding additional coal power to the state’s energy mix, according to a new Montana Free Press-Eagleton poll. 

The results of the poll, conducted in late December and early January, come as the Trump and Gianforte administrations work to expand domestic energy production amid a surge in demand wrought by growth in artificial intelligence and other electricity-intensive industries.

Respondents were presented with a list of electricity sources and asked if they thought Montana should produce more, less or about the same amount of power from each source. The options included hydropower, coal and wind — all of which play a prominent role in Montana’s current energy mix — as well solar and natural gas, which make up a smaller but growing contribution to the state’s energy grid.

According to an October analysis by Montana Free Press, the state’s single largest power producer is the 40-year-old coal-fired power plant in Colstrip, which is capable of generating up to 1,650 megawatts of electricity.

The largest class of generation in the state, in contrast, is hydropower: Western Montana dams can generate more than 2,500 megawatts of power when they’re operating at full capacity. 

A third behemoth in the energy landscape is wind. Since 2020, energy developers like Berkshire Hathaway Energy and Pacific Northwest utilities such as Avista and Puget Sound Energy have invested in massive wind projects collectively capable of generating more than 1,000 megawatts of power — and additional wind farms are planned.

Utility-scale solar energy makes a tiny share of Montana’s electricity mix, accounting for just 2% of the megawatt hours generated within the state’s borders. But it garnered the most enthusiasm in the poll, with 56% of respondents supporting additional solar generation. A similar percentage, 55%, said the same about natural gas, which accounts for nearly 700 megawatts of capacity distributed between seven small- and medium-sized plants.

Coal, which represents about 22% of the state’s current generation capacity, was much less popular. Just 36% of respondents supported additional coal-fired power and around the same number, 39%, said they want less.

Gov. Greg Gianforte and Montana’s federal delegation, all Republicans, are aligned with President Donald Trump in backing coal, which has fueled Montana’s largest power plant for more than 40 years. Jon Tester, the last Democrat to hold a statewide office, supported both renewable and fossil fuel energy sources during his tenure at the U.S. Senate, occasionally countering the Biden administration’s efforts to tighten emission regulations and restrict new federal coal leasing.

Despite the current delegation’s vigorous support for coal mining and the long-debated Colstrip plant, demand for the carbon-intensive fuel has waned in recent years as utility companies shift broadly to cheaper and cleaner power sources such as natural gas and solar.

Bob Morris, Montana Tech’s Lance Energy Chair, described Colstrip as a “vital” and reliable resource that has helped Montana be an energy exporter for many decades. Even so, he said, market and political conditions aren’t spurring future investment in coal. 

“With emissions and the political uncertainty, you won’t find anyone willing to invest in coal,” Morris said. “Maybe today’s administration is favorable, but in three years it may be a different administration.”

NorthWestern Energy, Montana’s largest utility company, has significantly expanded the amount of coal and natural gas in its portfolio in recent years, building a 175-megawatt gas plant in Laurel and acquiring expanded stakes in the Colstrip plant as climate legislation forces West Coast utilities to exit the facility.

Morris said there is a long list of solar developers eager to tie utility-scale projects into the electrical grid, but the weather-dependent nature of solar power can pose a challenge for utilities. The Trump administration’s move to nix tax incentives for renewable energy projects may have dampened investors’ appetite for new solar projects, he added. 

Shifting subsidies are also making things harder for wind developers looking to tap into the state’s ready supply of wind. Despite D.C. policymakers’ move to eliminate tax incentives for new wind projects, utilities in Washington State and mega-investors like Berkshire Hathaway Energy have invested billions of dollars in Montana wind farms in recent years and additional investments are planned.

Morris said that future hydropower expansion is unlikely because most of the state’s potential dam locations have already been developed. He said concerns about fish passage also merit consideration in hydropower discussions.

“Every single energy conversion has a negative environmental impact,” he said. “We need to look at which impacts we’re willing to live with.”

The MTFP-Eagleton poll surveyed 801 registered voters through telephone interviews and text-to-web questionnaires. Data was collected from Dec. 23, 2025 to Jan. 3, 2026. The poll, which was weighted to reflect the state’s population of registered voters, has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.

This piece is part of the Montana Insights project, which is commissioning rounds of polling to help MTFP readers understand public sentiment on key Montana policy issues. Further findings from the Dec. 2025-Jan. 2026 poll are available here.

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President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Bureau of Land Management attempted on Wednesday to reassure U.S. senators that neither he nor Interior Secretary Doug Burgum favor a large-scale selloff of federal land.

Steve Pearce, a Republican who spent seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and chaired New Mexico’s Republican Party, appeared before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to pitch lawmakers on his suitability for the job. 

It was also an opportunity for Pearce to outline his vision for the BLM, which oversees 245 million acres of land and 700 million acres of subsurface minerals in the U.S., including 8 million acres of land in Montana. If Pearce’s nomination is approved by the full Senate, he will assume the helm of the country’s largest land management agency.

Pearce has been nominated to the role formerly held by Tracy Stone-Manning, the Montanan who led the BLM under the Biden administration after narrowly clearing a Senate vote in 2021. 

Pearce, who served in the Vietnam War and owned an oil and gas well-servicing company prior to his political career, has come under fire from conservation groups and Democratic lawmakers who have questioned his intentions for the BLM. An agency with a “multiple use” mission, the BLM balances recreational and cultural resources alongside various forms of commercial enterprise, ranging from livestock grazing and fossil fuel development to hard-rock mining and logging.

During the Wednesday hearing, Pearce said he garnered an appreciation for “conserving and preserving” land by growing up on a small farm and during backpacking trips in wilderness areas after his return from the Vietnam War. He also suggested that the federal government has been largely misguided in its land management approach by acting as an “absentee landlord” that “rules over” states and local communities rather than partnering with them.

Shortly after Trump announced Pearce as his BLM pick in November, conservation groups opposed to his nomination began surfacing concerns about Pearce’s plans. A coalition of advocacy groups including Wild Montana, Montana Conservation Voters and Montana Wildlife Federation highlighted a 2012 letter that Pearce and others penned to then-House Speaker John Boehner as part of a federal deficit reduction proposal.

“Divesting the federal government of its vast land holdings could pay down the deficit and reduce spending. The federal government owns roughly 650 million acres of land or 1/3 of the entire landmass of our country. Over 90% of this land is located in the western states and most of it we do not even need,” the letter read. “Strategically transferring ownership of these lands where it makes sense would reduce duplicative land management costs, boost revenues through the resultant economic activity of more productive and local land management, and is consistent with the principles of federalism our founding fathers envisioned.”

Sen. Martin Heinrich, the ranking Democrat on the committee, who also hails from New Mexico, raised the issue of whether “the new BLM agenda” includes the large-scale sale of agency-administered land — an issue that both Republican and Democratic senators on the committee returned to repeatedly during the two-hour hearing.

Pearce responded that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has said “that he does not visualize any sales of land.” Pearce added that he would “gladly” accept the help of the senators on the committee in identifying the “isolated” parcels that might be appropriate for sale. 

Asked by Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden if Pearce still holds a view that he previously expressed — that there is too much land under public ownership in the West — the nominee rationalized his past statements and referenced laws such as the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.

“I’m not so sure that I’ve changed. I’m not sure that I was not speaking out of sheer frustration with an agency on behalf of people that were being overwhelmed,” he said. “I do not believe that we’re going to go out and wholesale land from the federal government. That, again, has been stated by the [Interior] Secretary, and federal law says that we can’t do that.”

Montana’s representative on the committee, Republican Sen. Steve Daines, took a wide berth around the land transfer issue, instead asking Pearce if he supports the Land and Water Conservation Fund, the 60-year-old funding pot supported by offshore oil and gas revenues.

“Absolutely,” Pearce said, responding to Daines’ question about using LWCF money to expand hunting, fishing and recreational access to BLM land.

Daines also asked Pearce about his vision for forested BLM lands, a category that includes more than 1.3 million acres managed by the agency’s office spanning Montana and the Dakotas. Pearce echoed Daines’ preference for “active forest management,” arguing that it needs to be done at scale, and that the right approach is to “aggressively thin” forests rather than clear-cut them.

Daines intends to support Pearce’s nomination, his spokesperson, Gabby Wiggins, wrote in an email to Montana Free Press.

Shortly after the Wednesday hearing wrapped up, Wild Montana released a statement saying the organization is not convinced that Pearce’s priorities have changed, and that federal land will be safe.

“Pearce has a 15-year track record of wanting to privatize public lands — including the BLM lands he’d be responsible for. Halfhearted lip service doesn’t erase that history,” Wild Montana staff attorney Aubrey Bertram said in an emailed statement. “Pearce is just saying what he thinks will get him confirmed, but the truth is the same as it was yesterday: he’s unfit to serve at the BLM.”

For Pearce’s  nomination to advance, it must be approved by a majority of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the larger U.S. Senate.

This story was updated on Feb. 26, 2026, to include a comment from a spokesperson for U.S. Senator Steve Daines.

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For decades, wildlife managers in Wyoming, Colorado and Utah have been grappling with the spread of chronic wasting disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that sickens and ultimately kills ungulates such as deer, elk and moose over a period of months or years. 

The disease is now well established in Montana, according to wildlife managers. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks told state lawmakers last month that the infection curve is climbing, particularly among white-tailed and mule deer. According to FWP’s analysis, the disorder, first detected in 2017, is spreading in the Treasure State. 

“We now know that chronic wasting disease is found in 33% of hunt districts in Montana, it’s found in all susceptible species, and as of the end of our last hunting season, the data showed that our highest three-year prevalence was 39% in white-tailed deer and 23% in mule deer,” FWP wildlife biologist Bevin McCormick told lawmakers. 

So, will we see a decline in Montana’s deer and elk populations?

McCormick said there isn’t enough data to conclude with certainty if CWD is contributing to the decline in eastern Montana mule deer populations, but that the state is doing its best to manage the disease by increasing monitoring efforts, expanding hunting opportunities where it has been found, and educating hunters on proper carcass disposal.

Even if it’s too early to tell if Montana hunters and other wildlife stakeholders should prepare for a sustained deer population decline, neighboring Wyoming’s experience with the disease offers a cautionary tale about what happens when the disorder becomes endemic, or consistently present, in a given region.

CWD is believed to have originated in the 1960s or 1970s from a U.S. Department of Agriculture facility in northern Colorado where scientists were researching a related disease called Scrapie that infects sheep and goats, according to the National Institutes of Health.

In a recent conversation with Montana Free Press, leading CWD researcher Peter Larsen described Wyoming and Colorado as the “epicenter” of CWD in the United States. That’s because the disease, which is caused by a highly transmissible misfolded protein called a prion, has been present there for decades. 

Wildlife researchers in 2017 estimated that a 20% CWD infection rate among mule deer in southeastern Wyoming would lead to a 21% population decline. According to a related paper published the year prior, CWD-infected white-tailed deer were 4.5 times more likely to die in a given year than those without the disease. Under a worst-case scenario, chronic levels of CWD in that area of eastern Wyoming could lead to the “possible extinction” of that particular population within five decades, researchers concluded.

Larsen, who co-directs the Minnesota Center for Prion Research and Outreach, underscored that risk. He told MTFP that Montana wildlife managers and other stakeholders should prepare for a future with fewer ungulates and possibly CWD transmission to other species. That’s due, in part, to the fact that the disease often progresses slowly — it’s not uncommon for an animal to carry CWD for several years before succumbing to it — but disperses widely.

“CWD is spreading fast throughout the U.S., but we’re really only at the very beginning,” Larsen said. “The way this disease spreads and how those infections spread make it really difficult to manage.”

CWD is highly infectious, in part because the prions that cause it can continue to sicken animals long after the carrier has died. A study in Wisconsin has demonstrated that the prions that cause CWD, which an infected animal sheds in its bodily fluids and tissues, can persist in the environment for 16 years, Larsen said.

“In a late-stage white-tailed deer with CWD, there are enough prions in that brain to kill all deer in North America,” he added. “We’re starting to get worried about accumulation in the environment and other species coming into contact with it.”

As the disease becomes more widespread, the risk that it will jump the species barrier and infect other animals, such as mountain lions or coyotes, increases, Larsen said. While humans can’t contract CWD, the disease poses a “non-zero” risk to them, he said. “Some studies show there’s a really strong species barrier. Other studies show it’s not 100%, and there may actually be potential [for] crossover.”

Researchers trying to learn more about whether the prions become more or less infectious as they move through the food chain, according to Larson, are grappling with a “dynamic” situation. It’s possible, he said, that movement through an animal’s GI tract can change the prions’ shape in a way that increases the infection risk for other species.

“It’s really difficult to know whether or not predators are going to be an effective way to manage it,” Larsen continued. “I don’t think it hurts anything … but it’s still going to be spreading during that long incubation time.”

Asked about the most effective tools to limit the spread of CWD, Larsen responded, “hunting, hunting, hunting.” Culling is another management approach, though Missouri’s experience with that strategy has demonstrated that taking such an aggressive approach to CWD can invite controversy.

FWP spokesperson Greg Lemon said Montana’s approach centers on enlisting hunters to help with monitoring and hunting efforts.

“If we can keep prevalence low where it exists, we can hopefully limit the disease’s ability to spread to other herds that might not have CWD yet,” Lemon said. “And if we can do that with the help of hunters … then we can protect the herds and the hunting heritage that we value in Montana.”

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A snowmobiler died in an avalanche near the Montana-Idaho border over the weekend. It is Idaho’s first avalanche fatality of the 2025-2026 season.

The slide occurred on Feb. 22 north of the Keg Springs trailhead in the Centennial Mountains near Island Park, Idaho, according to the Gallatin National Forest Avalanche Center.

In a Sunday evening Instagram post, the avalanche center wrote that it would be investigating the circumstances surrounding the avalanche — standard procedure for fatal avalanches — on Monday. 

“Our thoughts are with the family and friends of the victim during this tragic time,” the avalanche center’s post read.

According to preliminary information, the avalanche was unintentionally triggered by a snowmobiler at approximately 2 p.m. Sunday. The slide occurred on an eastern aspect along a persistent weak layer in the snowpack, according to the avalanche center, which lists the Island Park area as having “considerable” avalanche danger.

Two other individuals in the group may have been caught in the slide as well, but were uninjured, the avalanche center wrote in its preliminary report.

As of Feb. 23, there have been 18 avalanche fatalities throughout the West, according to Avalanche.org, which serves as a clearinghouse for educational resources and information on avalanche incidents. Eleven of this winter’s fatalities occurred in California, which has seen three deadly slides this winter. 

Twelve backcountry skiers and three guides were caught in an avalanche near Perry Peak, California, on Feb. 17. Nine of the group died in that slide, which has been described as the deadliest avalanche in modern California history.

Avalanche risk is currently listed as “considerable” in the mountains of south-central and southwest Montana. In northwest Montana, which saw significant snowfall in the past week, conditions were upgraded to “high,” one level from “extreme,” which is the highest-ranking level of avalanche danger, according to the Flathead Avalanche Center. 

Avalanche forecasters in that area issued an avalanche warning Monday morning urging backcountry skiers and snowmobilers to steer clear of avalanche terrain due to the potential for “very large” natural or remotely triggered avalanches. A winter weather advisory remains in effect for the West Glacier area through Tuesday morning with up to 7 inches of snow expected along mountain passes and wind gusting to up 35 miles per hour. Forecasters note that these slides could break hundreds of feet across a slope and run their full slide-path potential from upper elevations down to valley floors.

“The past week has seen at least seven reported near-misses or accidents,” the center wrote in its warning. “Keep what might seem like a ridiculous distance from avalanche terrain today.”

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has reversed a Biden-era air quality rule that tightened regulations for heavy metals released when coal is burned to make electricity — a rule that could have forced the closure of Montana’s largest power generator, the Colstrip coal plant.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin wrote in a Friday morning press release that the agency had undone a regulatory action by his predecessor that would have “destroyed reliable American energy.” The rollback of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standard, or MATS rule, has been widely anticipated since the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term. 

“The Biden-Harris Administration’s anti-coal regulations sought to regulate out of existence this vital sector of our energy economy,” Zeldin said in the release. “The Trump EPA knows that we can grow the economy, enhance baseload power, and protect human health and the environment all at the same time. It is not a binary choice and never should have been.”

Environmental groups argued that the EPA is failing to comply with federal laws that require industrial polluters to protect downwind communities from unnecessary health risks.

Montana Environmental Information Center Executive Director Anne Hedges told Montana Free Press in a Friday morning interview that legal challenges to the rule repeal are likely. “Reams” of data established that the 2024 standard is both achievable with current technology and protects public health, she said.

“Trump doesn’t have the right to rewrite the Clean Air Act,” Hedges said. “There is no doubt that there will be lawsuits over this because we are talking about lives — lives that are being harmed, lives that are being lost. He has picked the coal industry over people’s health and their prospect of getting cancer from really serious pollution sources like arsenic.”

Rob Byron, a physician with Montana Health Professionals for a Healthy Climate, wrote in a statement that increased air pollution resulting from the rule repeal “will result in many more Americans dying needlessly and thousands more hospitalizations.”

“In repealing the 2024 MATS standards, the current administration again puts corporate profits ahead of Americans’ health,” Byron said.

The coal-fired plant in Colstrip has been at the center of the debate over the 2024 rule. NorthWestern Energy, the utility that co-owns the plant, argued in a federal lawsuit seeking to halt the rule’s implementation that it was forced into an “untenable” position by the stricter standard: retire the plant early, or spend $350 million on upgrades only to face another closure risk in another few years if another set of Biden regulations comes down even harder on coal plants over climate change concerns. (Zeldin’s EPA has also moved to reverse those greenhouse gas regulations.)

With support from Montana politicians, NorthWestern secured a temporary reprieve from the MATS rule last spring using a section of the Clean Air Act that allows plant to receive a two-year variance from a standard “if the President determines that the technology to implement such a standard is not available and that it is in the national security interests of the United States to do so.”

In a Friday afternoon text message, NorthWestern spokesperson Jo Dee Black thanked Montana’s federal delegation for working to repeal the standard in “support of an outcome that reflects Montana’s needs.”

“Today’s EPA decision helps ensure Montanans continue to have reliable, cost-effective energy service in all weather conditions, including during cold winter nights,” she wrote.

Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte also cheered the EPA’s announcement, arguing that coal plant jobs will be protected as a result of the regulation repeal.

“The demand for energy is only increasing. Through this action, the federal government shows its support for states like Montana that are focused on strengthening and securing our grid to keep the lights and heat on in our homes, schools and businesses,” Gianforte said in the release.

The announcement comes as federal policymakers have taken other steps to prop up the faltering coal industry, such as reopening the Powder River Basin to new leases and lowering royalty rates for federal coal.

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While Montana might not be viewed as an artificial intelligence hotbed, it is considered among the top states in the country with potential to “power the AI revolution.” An analysis CNBC published last July based on grid reliability and average market electricity price named Montana as the  No. 3 state in the country for its potential to power data centers. Despite that, only a handful of relatively small data centers have been built in the Treasure State, and several operations have come and gone.

But the state of play could change — quickly — as proposals for new data centers garner traction in energy, economic development and political circles. Big Tech’s race to deploy AI, which the Brookings Institute has described as “the transformative technology of our time,” is spurring a corresponding rush to build data centers, massive warehouse-like buildings filled with stacks of chip-laden servers that have been likened to the “backbone” supporting AI.

The push for infrastructure to support the technology is also on display in Montana, as data-center developers and energy executives work to capture a piece of a rapidly growing market. Preliminary agreements that NorthWestern Energy, Montana’s largest utility, has signed with three companies in the past 14 months have given Montanans a general idea of how much electricity these large new data centers would require, but information about their water usage is in short supply. Wary of project developers’ tight-lipped approach to discussing their proposals, environmental watchdogs warn that a hands-off strategy could turn Montana communities into “sacrifice zones” to serve the data-processing needs of some of the world’s largest companies.

Data center experts that Montana Free Press interviewed in recent weeks said the lack of transparency could be by design. Project developers have been hustling to secure hundreds of millions, or even billions, of financing dollars before local pushback and potential regulatory changes spook investors in a competitive market that some industry insiders have described as a “global arms race.”

Aaron Wemhoff, a mechanical engineer who studies data centers’ environmental impacts as part of a consortium focused on energy-efficient electronic systems, told MTFP that center developers are running up against a power supply bottleneck and opposition from nearby residents wary of environmental impacts.

“I think that is what is setting the pace of development,” Wemhoff said. “What you’re seeing is that a lot of data centers are now being built in rural locations [where] there’s a little bit less resistance and perhaps they’re getting friendlier governments.”

Whether they’re inclined to support or oppose them, many Montanans are hungry for more information, and data-center developers have been reluctant to provide it.  Montana Environmental Information Center Executive Director Anne Hedges told MTFP that these companies might be looking for “easy pickings” in Montana, but residents of Butte, Billings, Broadview and Great Falls have shown an “overwhelming interest” in the topic at educational events MEIC has co-hosted. Hedges said public engagement with this issue is like nothing else she’s encountered in the 32 years she’s worked for MEIC, an environmental nonprofit that also serves as a corporate watchdog.

“We’ve had to turn people away in a room that holds hundreds,” Hedges said, referring to last month’s talk in Billings, which turned into a standing-room-only event. “It’s fascinating from an academic perspective, but certainly from the perspective of somebody who wants to get regulations in place to protect Montanans from what the richest men in America want to do.”

MEIC is concerned that NorthWestern Energy’s existing customers’ electricity bills will rise to fund power plants, substations and transmission lines to serve new data centers that might shutter in a few years’ time.Running parallel to that issue is uncertainty about what data-center development means for the rivers, lakes and aquifers that support two of the top industries in this arid state — agriculture and outdoor recreation.

Although all data centers that process large volumes of information require a cooling system, there are a variety of ways to run them. Wemhoff said there is a tradeoff involved: evaporative cooling systems require more water but less electricity. “Closed loop” or “open-air” systems typically use less water but are less efficient in that they require more electricity. 

“To me, the true water footprint is the water that’s consumed on site, but you also should include the water that’s consumed in the process of generating the electricity that the data center is consuming,” Wemhoff said. Fossil fuel plants often consume significant quantities of water, contributing to a larger water-use footprint, he added. 

Montanans still don’t have a fulsome accounting of these new proposals’ water impacts, but some information has been in circulation as companies like Quantica and Sabey approach their projected operational dates. This is what we know as of early February.

QUANTICA: 1,000 MEGAWATT FACILITY SOUTH OF BROADVIEW

A recently formed Texas-based company called Quantica Infrastructureis planning a “high-performance computing” campus to support artificial intelligence — an industry that’s expected to garner trillions of dollars of investment by 2030. Quantica has secured a 5,000-acre property south of Broadview for the project, which it is calling Big Sky Digital Infrastructure.

The project would require a continuous supply of up to 1 gigawatt of power, which is more than the average load NorthWestern Energy uses to serve its 400,000-plus electricity customers. Since facilities that require a lot of power typically generate a lot of heat, the energy footprint can be a helpful proxy for cooling — and therefore water — requirements.

In a Jan. 26 email to MTFP, Quantica wrote that the company aims to minimize its water use to avoid resource conflicts. Details on its cooling system will depend on environmental assessments and its customers’ needs, the company wrote, adding that it does not intend to source water from the town of Broadview, a rural community north of Billings with fewer than 150 residents and a limited water supply. 

“We’re evaluating multiple approaches including zero-water air cooling, deep aquifer wells, treated greywater, and direct-to-chip liquid systems that reduce water consumption 20 to 90% versus older data center cooling technologies,” the company  wrote. Quantica is looking to move quickly on its project, which will have limited local oversight due to the absence of zoning in that area of Yellowstone County.

Quantica doesn’t currently possess any water rights, according to the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. Like other users of large quantities of surface water or groundwater, the company would therefore be required to go through an administrative process designed to ensure that existing water users in the area aren’t negatively impacted by new withdrawals, a process that can take years. Despite that, the company anticipates moving forward with site construction this year.

Quantica’s energy-procurement plan includes incorporating “traditional” grid power along with renewable and battery energy storage. It has 45,000 acres of land under lease and on-site solar, wind and battery storage infrastructure have been “quietly” under development, Quantica CEO John Chesser told the Voices of Montana radio program last September. But its near-term power source, at least temporarily, is likely to include coal given its proximity to the high-voltage transmission lines leading out of Colstrip, the state’s largest power plant. Hedges, with MEIC, said Quantica could be one of the customers NorthWestern plans to serve with the nearly 600-megawatt share of the Colstrip plant it acquired last month. 

SABEY: 250-MEGAWATT FACILITY WEST OF BUTTE

In December of 2024, Sabey Data Centers, a company based in the Seattle area, reached a power-procurement agreement with NorthWestern for up to 250 megawatts of power. A few months later, the company reached a tentative — and still-pending — agreement with the Butte-Silver Bow Commission to purchase 600 acres of government-owned land in the Montana Connections Business Park, an industrial area west of Butte, for $1.2 million. 

Sabey is also looking to the Butte-Silver Bow Commission for water to cool its system. More specifically, it plans to use an existing water right that conveyed snowmelt from multiple drainages in the Pintler Mountains to the smelter in Anaconda for nearly a century. When the smelter was operational, as many as 80 million gallons of Silver Lake water would surge down to Anaconda, but daily use now rarely tops 10 million gallons per day.

At an interim water policy meeting last month, Rob Corbin, Sabey’s senior vice president of energy development, told lawmakers the company will use “air-first cooling,” to take advantage of Montana’s cool and dry climate. Water-based cooling using industrial water — the Silver Lake water that Butte-Silver Bow owns — will kick in during the hottest days of the year, Corbin said, adding that there won’t be “routine” water discharge. (Even the closed-loop systems with less evaporative water loss require occasional draining and refilling.)

Despite Corbin’s assurance to lawmakers that Sabey is emphasizing “transparency from Day One,” Sabey’s governmental affairs manager did not agree to MTFP’s interview request. The company has been in communication with Montana Tech Lance Energy Chair Bob Morris, who used the facility’s energy requirements and local climate data to provide rough calculations of the facility’s anticipated water usage at a recent presentation before the Butte-Silver Bow Commission. 

According to Morris’ calculations, extra water for cooling will only be required when the outside air temperature exceeds 80 degrees, or between 30 and 60 days of July and August. He said that’s when the evaporative cooling system will kick in, which is estimated to use about 16 million gallons per year. Morris likened the total volume of water required over the course of a year — 44,000 gallons daily — to three garden hoses running continuously at full capacity, describing the usage as a “small” share of an underutilized water right.

Butte-Silver Bow Commissioner Russell O’Leary echoed Morris’ assessment of the underused nature of that industrial water, telling MTFP in a recent interview that water managers rarely fire up the pump to move Silver Lake water these days. Its water is occasionally channeled into Warm Springs Creek to support instream flows during drought years. Otherwise, much of the Silver Lake water flows down to Georgetown Lake, which supplies farmers and ranchers with water for irrigation, O’Leary said. 

During the Jan. 27 meeting, members of the public spoke both in support of and opposition to the project. Butte “needs to look to the future,” architect Dan O’Neill offered, arguing that the city should “take what we can get.” 

Another Butte resident, Linda Trevenna, countered that Sabey appears to be dodging public scrutiny and has at times offered contradictory information.

“Why is Mr. Morris putting together the presentation for Sabey and using the words, ‘I’m assuming’ [and] ‘this is what I’ve read’? Why isn’t Sabey producing their own defined, guaranteed diagram of what they intend?” Trevenna asked.

A Sabey employee attended the 2-hour commission meeting remotely but spoke little.

ATLAS POWER’S 150-MEGAWATT EXPANSION: BUTTE

At the tail end of 2024, two days after it issued a statement about its agreement with Sabey, NorthWestern announced that it had signed a letter of intent with Atlas Power Group to supply an additional 150 megawatts to its flagship facility, a cryptocurrency mining operation in Butte.

Atlas did not respond to MTFP’s multiple requests for comment. O’Leary told MTFP that Atlas uses a different cooling system than what Sabey is proposing. Atlas’ existing facility is more dependent on air circulation than water-based cooling, he said. 

“They have gigantic fans that are out on the roof of the building. They basically pull air in from the outside, run it through the system and push it back out,” he said. “It is a fairly noisy facility. That’s not what is being proposed [in Butte] by Sabey.”

Atlas’ facility is authorized to use a negligible amount of water. According to DNRC, Atlas Power Holdings has a water right that enables the company to use up to 2 acre-feet of groundwater per year, roughly equivalent to the annual water usage of four households.

Atlas purchased the water right from CryptoWatt, a company that launched a bitcoin mining operation in 2018 and later shuttered following legal allegations that the founder created a Ponzi scheme.

It is unclear if Atlas intends to use its expansion for cryptocurrency mining. Hedges said she wouldn’t be surprised if the company transitions to other types of data processing to align with market demands and find a more stable customer base.

“When you get into the bigger data centers that are using these Nvidia chips that really have high power demand and get really hot, air just isn’t as efficient,” Hedges said. “That’s why these companies are moving toward using water cooling.”

WHAT HAPPENS NOW?

Kerri Hickenbottom, a University of Arizona professor of chemical and mechanical engineering, described the current situation as a “black box” where communities are scrambling to learn about data center impacts — and mitigation opportunities — amid exponential growth in AI, cloud computing and government document storage. 

“These data centers are just building as fast as they can and cities have really struggled with how to incorporate [them],” said Hickenbottom, who started researching data centers’ water usage when they started cropping up in the Phoenix area.

Some local governments are developing novel approaches to resource concerns, such as requiring data centers to use wastewater for their cooling needs — and to treat it themselves. Data-center developers can also spur utilities to develop more renewable power sources, she noted.

“We’re all responsible for this, too, because we’re using the data,” Hickenbottom said. “If we weren’t using the data, they wouldn’t be building more data centers.”

The post As AI investors eye Montana for new data centers, communities brace for water impacts appeared first on Montana Free Press.

A federal judge on Jan. 26 ruled that a lawsuit filed by two Montana State University students whose visas were temporarily revoked last year under the Trump administration’s “student criminal alien initiative” can proceed.

The students, who are from Turkey and Iran, are referred to as John Roe and Jane Doe in the lawsuit they filed last year. One was pursuing a master’s degree in microbiology and the other was working toward a doctorate in physics and electrical engineering when MSU discovered during a routine review of international student records that their F-1 visas had been revoked. 

Shortly after that discovery, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on behalf of the students, arguing that their visas should be restored because they were in “full compliance” with their visas’ terms and the federal government failed to provide the students or their school with “any meaningful explanation” for their visas’ termination.

Days after the lawsuit’s filing, Dana Christensen, a federal district court judge in Missoula, blocked the Department of Homeland Security from revoking the visas. DHS asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit in September, arguing that the plaintiffs’ claims were moot because their visas had been reinstated and DHS had changed its policies. The students opposed the motion, maintaining that “there is no assurance that [the federal government] will not once again unlawfully and arbitrarily” revoke the students’ visas in the future.

In a 15-page order issued on Jan. 26, Christensen sided with the plaintiffs, writing that “it is simply not clear what DHS’ new policy is, and consequently, whether that new policy fully addresses the issues presented in this case.” Christensen also agreed with the plaintiffs that it is not clear that “the challenged conduct will not recur.”

Alex Rate, an attorney for ACLU, told the Helena Independent Record that the judge’s order will allow the plaintiffs to depose immigration officials about their actions.

The Doe v. Noem lawsuit is one of at least 65 lawsuits filed against the federal government last year in response to its move to “quietly and unexpectedly” terminate international students’ visas, according to reporting by Inside Higher Ed. Judges assigned to those cases blocked the revocations in more than half of them, Inside Higher Ed found in its April report.

Disclosure: MSU president Brock Tessman is married to former MTFP deputy director and current part-time MTFP contractor Kristin Tessman. MTFP business staff do not have input into editorial coverage.

The post Judge says lawsuit brought by two MSU students who had visas revoked can proceed  appeared first on Montana Free Press.