@mhayday.bsky.social:
My university’s Office of Teaching and Learning is offering a workshop on how to “leverage” Generative AI to develop lecture content. The thought of it makes me ill and I am tired of being quiet on social media about how this insidious, environmentally-destructive cult is being so blindly embraced.
@birchbobocel.bsky.social:
The UCP will just replace Council like they’ve threatened to do in some other municipalities
@crtcltheology.bsky.social:
CBC has a misleading headline. Alberta doesn’t want it, Smith does. Those aren’t the same thing.
@gaialuv.bsky.social:
I knew this was coming. Of course this is something Smith supports. What she won’t talk about is the massive amounts of energy & water these centres require. And in the USA, ppl living around these data centres r the one paying for the energy they use. In some cases their electricity bills tripled.
@jekllnnhide.bsky.social:
foreign coal companies destroy your mountain snowpack. datacenters consume tons of water.
I thought AB prided farming?
I thought AB had a significant population who need to drink and wash?
What is Smith doing? Just taking the payola and trying to screw you all?
STOPvotingConservative
@mondoab.bsky.social:
Also wonder about downstream, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
@nanawanda.bsky.social:
Good for them. They can see the writing on the wall.
@flinterr.bsky.social:
All about water.
@walterverse.bsky.social:
It’s not often enough all of us together can say.. Way to go Alberta!! The ever ludicrous expanding AI/Data Centre industry can’t survive on a planet with limited resources.
Smith and Carney are clueless. Carney should also be called out every time he says AI and Quantum
@kay-ee-one-are-eye.bsky.social:
And in Jason Nixon‘s riding to boot
@greenglassworm.bsky.social:
Cheers and applause erupting from me about this too!
Alberta wants to become an AI data centre hub, but this rural county just rejected a big proposal, Neighbouring landowners cited concerns about new data centre complex on farmland, future water implications by Rukhsar Ali, CBC News, Sep 12, 2025
Almost a year after the Alberta government announced its strategy to attract artificial intelligence data centre investments to the province, one of those early proposed projects has faced a major setback in a county just northeast of Calgary.
Cheers and applause erupted from the audience in the Rocky View County council chamber on Tuesday after councillors voted 6-1 to reject a plan for an AI data centre complex, citing concerns about its proposed location and potential impacts on neighbouring farmers.
The project developer, Kineticor Asset Management, aimed to build a campus in the county’s northeast quadrant amidst farmland, spanning approximately 448 hectares – just over 1.5 times the size of CrossIron Mills.
Alberta county refuses plan to put data centre next to farm land
Rocky View County council voted down a proposal to redevelop farm land northeast of Calgary into a site to home several data centres. The reeve says despite provincial aspirations to attract these data centres to power artificial intelligence, this particular plan just didn’t fit where it was proposed.
The proposed development site would have been situated right next to farmer Wayne Shuttleworth’s land. In July, he received the project proposal and supporting studies, including an environmental assessment and water drainage plan for the first phase of the project.
Among a list of concerns, Shuttleworth said he was worried about stormwater drainage from the complex harming his crops and a lack of clarity from the developer on how that issue would be mitigated.
“As I read through the technical documents, it is very nicely polished and they say all the nice right words … But if you look into their studies, there’s just too much work that’s missing,” he told CBC News the day of the public hearing.
“They defer things to what needs to be studied at a later date or this can be done at development application time. No, it should be done now. We need to know … [what] the impact is going to be right now.”
The project development was proposed in five phases, with a full build-out to occur over the next 15-20 years. Once complete, the project was planned to accommodate about six data centres, an on-site reservoir and supporting power generation facility.
For the first phase, the project’s team said it had already been allocated electricity by the Alberta Electric Systems Operator, which has a temporary cap on how many new data centres can be added to the electrical grid.
Land and water costs of AI data centres a top concern
Over the 10-hour-long public hearing, council heard from Kineticor’s team, eStruxture, the Montreal-based data centre operator involved with the project, and farmers and landowners in Rocky View County on both sides of the issue. More than 50 presenters stated their opposition to the technology park proposal, while four spoke in favour.
Among the major concerns presented to the council, opposing county landowners said the new development would mean losing prime farmland with high classification, farmable soils.
“Why can’t this be put in a more appropriate place? They [Rocky View County] already have identified areas for industrial growth. … Put it there,” said Shuttleworth, referring to an existing technology park in East Balzac.
Another common concern was the technology park’s potential water consumption. The proposed plan aimed to draw potable water from the county’s water treatment plant.
What concerned Shuttleworth is how a drought year would impact farmers’ access to water with a data centre next door. As recently as 2023, Shuttleworth said many farmers in the county had to restrict their irrigation systems during a water shortage.
A recent US-based study from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute found that large data centres can consume up to 19 million litres per day. That’s equivalent to the water use of a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people. Much of that water consumption comes from cooling systems meant to keep racks of servers from overheating.
Making the case for the complex at Tuesday’s public hearing, eStruxture vice-president and head of corporate development and capital markets Taylor Hammond said eStruxture uses closed-loop cooling that’s more sustainable.
“You’ll wonder why some data centres in the U.S. are using a whole bunch of water and are loud. It’s because it’s expensive to invest in infrastructure that doesn’t consume water and that’s quiet. And that’s something that has been built into our business model from the beginning,” Hammond told council.
EStruxture already operates two data centre sites in the Calgary region: CAL-1 and CAL-2. The company recently broke ground on CAL-3 elsewhere in Rocky View County, which is scheduled for launch in the fall.
“We expect that this site will support our development needs to bring Rocky View and Alberta into the digital future,” Hammond said, before the plan was rejected.
Kineticor did not respond to comments after council voted down its proposal.
For landowner Keith Jones, whose property would have also bordered the development site, that “digital future” and its potential economic benefits were appealing, making him one of only a handful of people who spoke in favour of the project at the hearing.
“We’re in a race to compete around the world. We have tech startups in the local area that need to be a part of this,” Jones said.
“[AI data centres are] an important growth area for our economy. It’s important for our societies. And we can’t wait. We can’t dither. If we want to take advantage of these opportunities, it needs to happen now.”
AI data centre race will play out in rural Alberta, expert says
The project approval process was expedited by Rocky View County council after it passed a motion in the spring, following the province’s push to see $100 billion worth of AI data centres get under construction over the next five years. Many residents opposed how quickly the project was being moved forward.
Sabrina Perić, an associate professor in the department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Calgary and co-director of the Energy Stories Lab, said the provincial push to attract and build data centre infrastructure “is going to be a big issue moving forward for rural municipalities.”
“A lot of data centres require quite large footprints, and so I imagine our smaller rural municipalities will be the most impacted by data centres as opposed to urban centres where they’re just really isn’t the space,” she said.
To avoid repeating what happened in Rocky View County, Perić said the province will need to engage more with the public and experts, addressing those critical questions around the land, water and energy costs of data centres.
Those same concerns led Rocky View County Reeve Crystal Kissel to vote against the plan proposal on Tuesday.
“AI is a little bit yet unknown, so we have to be careful just like every other municipality faced with this in Alberta right now. We’re all trying to be careful, making good decisions, and it’s hard to make decisions on things that are really new that we totally don’t have our head around at this point,” she told CBC News.
“So, yes, there’s a place for it, and I’m hoping Kineticor will come back with a new idea and new plan.”
Founded by Trump’s energy secretary, Liberty Energy aims to lead the AI-driven fracking future by Jordan Blum, September 14, 2025, Fortune
Liberty Energy
Enter the “Hive.” Just outside of Denver, a small team of people oversees Liberty Energy’s entire fleet of fracking operations nationwide, largely to supervise the AI-automated work with human eyes.
Instead of golden honey, the Hive facilitates the churning out of millions of barrels of black gold—the crude oil produced from Liberty’s increasingly AI-dominated hydraulic fracturing, called fracking, that now requires fewer crews and people. Amid lower oil prices and activity levels, those savings are key.
Liberty, founded 14 years ago by President Trump’s new Energy Secretary Chris Wright, is now led by CEO Ron Gusek, as the company has grown into a U.S. fracking leader along with the more household name of Halliburton. The companies are leaning into autonomous, digitalized oilfields for safer, faster, cleaner (on a relative basis) and, ultimately, more cost-efficient work.
The combination of horizontal drilling and fracking revitalized the U.S. oil industry 20 years ago. Fracking means pumping millions of pounds of sand and millions of gallons of water and chemicals into each well with the necessary pressures to release the oil and gas. The intensity of the fracs has increased substantially—more and more sand and water per well—as have the downhole visualizations and the ability to optimize the frac job along each foot of these 20,000-foot wells. And much more of that work is now AI controlled.
“We are rapidly getting to full deployment—I expect by the end of this year we’ll be there—where this will all be done via AI computer algorithms,” Gusek said. “That’s not something a human can do. The role on location evolves a little bit from an operator deciding the throttle position and gear each pump was in to now providing oversight as a computer executes all that work, and does so at a level of efficiency we just simply couldn’t achieve before.”
More tech-savvy workers monitor from the Hive and on-site data vans while requiring less manual labor. The wells are drilled much longer and more are fracked at once—called simul-frac—so fewer rigs, frac fleets, and people are required. The U.S. oil and gas workforce has plunged 35% in just over a decade and the number of frac fleets is down 50% in six years, while U.S. oil production sits near world-leading, all-time highs despite recent signs of plateauing with oil prices down.
Liberty’s AI-driven, automated frac spread is controlled by its StimCommander system and augmented by the Forge learning cloud platform to continuously improve operations.
“The job of the classic roughneck is definitely evolving. It’s getting more sophisticated,” Gusek said. “The assets are getting larger and more automated. That means we don’t need as many people out there. We are arguably victims of our own success. That’s a good thing. That keeps the cost of energy low for humanity.”
Safety and supply chains
Liberty, Halliburton, and others are switching to modern electrified frac fleets that don’t require dirtier diesel fuel.
The fleets break down less often and the Hive uses Liberty’s “FracPulse” AI to predict any potential maintenance problems, courtesy of the real-time analysis of roughly 1 billion data points per day, Gusek said. In just a few months, he said, Liberty is doubling the life of much of its equipment.
“Rather than it become a major maintenance event, instead it’ll be a very minor maintenance event that could be addressed quickly on location,” Gusek said.
And, because there are still people in the oilfield, an AI-operated, 360-degree camera system alerts people in real time if they inadvertently step into the “line of fire” near moving equipment or trucks at a busy frac spread. “That was impossible with machine learning or Big Data analysis, but that is possible with AI,” Gusek said.
All of these improvements equate to less downtime and more speed, said Dan Pickering, founder and chief investment officer for Pickering Energy Partners consulting and research firm
“The days to complete a well are down notably. What are we attributing that to?” Pickering said. “It’s more AI and well-site automation, it’s an ability to see the subsurface, it’s the mindset that says, ‘We can do this faster, and we are.’ I think it’s the amalgamation of the technologies, not one specific one.”
Supply chains also are critical and often overlooked. For the U.S. oil industry, one of the biggest pain points is the delivery of tons and tons of sand for fracking.
Atlas Energy Solutions is now deploying driverless RoboTrucks to ship the sand on private lease roads in controlled environments. But the tech isn’t quite ready for busy highways.
Liberty’s solution is its Sentinel AI program to control the demand forecasting and the scheduling of every truck for the company’s roughly 1 million truck trips per year. The AI already has led to the elimination of 30% of the needed trucks, Gusek said.
“It used to be somebody’s job on location to try to control the cadence of trucks. Because they don’t want to be short on sand, the default was to line up eight or 10 of them and just have them sitting there waiting to offload,” Gusek said. “It means we never run out of sand, but it’s very, very inefficient for the driver. He spends an hour sitting waiting to unload instead of making roundtrips.”
That’s Liberty and the oil industry aim to survive for longer—fewer trucks, fewer rigs and fleets, fewer people, fewer emissions—fewer of everything, while producing the same or greater results. Time will tell.