# Water-Use Registration Arkansas's regime for registering and (lightly) regulating non-domestic water withdrawal, administered by the Arkansas Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Division. It is the framework that governs data-center cooling-water wells — and, as the FOIA corpus shows, it imposes little on a privately owned data-center well. ## The registration regime Three acts, summarized in the Department's registration packet ([[Google Data Center Water-Use Registration]], `Non-agri-Reg-Packet-2023-1 Galet.pdf`, p. 5): - **Act 81 of 1957** — requires all diverters of surface water to register their diversions annually (with narrow exceptions below one acre-foot/year). - **Act 1051 of 1985** — requires all users of non-domestic groundwater to register withdrawals, excluding household domestic wells and wells with a maximum potential flow under 50,000 gallons per day. Quantity, location, type of use, and user are registered annually. - **Act 154 of 1991** — authorizes a comprehensive groundwater-protection program, the designation of **Critical Groundwater Areas**, and an annual water-use fee ($10 per registered groundwater withdrawal and per surface-water diversion). Registration assigns a Facility ID and a Measurement Point ID (MPID) per withdrawal site; the Department uses the registrations to estimate statewide demand for the [[Arkansas Water Plan 2026 Demand and Supply Draft|Arkansas Water Plan]]. ## Metering and sustaining aquifers Under Act 1426 of 2001, a well withdrawing groundwater from a **"sustaining aquifer"** must be equipped with a functioning metering device. The sustaining aquifers include the **Sparta**, Memphis, Cockfield, Cane River, and others; the **Mississippi River Valley alluvial aquifer is not** a sustaining aquifer ([[Google Data Center Water-Use Registration]], `Non-agri-Reg-Packet-2023-1 Galet.pdf`, p. 6). The Google data center's two wells draw from the alluvial aquifer; the unnamed [[McClelland Consulting Engineers|MCE]] project plans to draw from the Sparta — which carries the metering requirement. ## The Water Plan Compliance gap **Water Plan Compliance (WPC)** is the Department's review process for water-service-area expansions and transfers. As Department staff explained in the FOIA correspondence ([[Data-Center Cooling-Water Regulatory Correspondence]]): - WPC applies only to **public water systems and political subdivisions**. A data center that drills, owns, and operates its own well is **not** subject to WPC review (Josh Burns; Blake Forrest, Natural Resources Division). - Outside a Critical Groundwater Area, *"the only regulatory requirement is well registration and annual well use reporting"* (Tate Wentz, Chief, Water Resources Management). The practical effect: a privately owned data-center cooling well — however large the withdrawal — faces only registration, a $10 annual fee, annual self-reported use, and (on a sustaining aquifer) metering. There is no permit, no withdrawal cap, and no Water Plan Compliance review unless a Critical Groundwater Area has been designated and the regulatory program activated there. ## How it appears in the corpus - [[Google Data Center Water-Use Registration]] — two existing wells registered to the Google Data Center, Facility ID 900055. - [[Data-Center Cooling-Water Regulatory Correspondence]] — engineers for two unnamed data centers confirm with the Department how little the regime requires of a private cooling well. ## Notes This regulatory gap bears directly on the investigation's central question of who bears the cost and impact of the hyperscale buildout: large industrial groundwater withdrawals for data-center cooling are, under current Arkansas law, registered and self-reported but not capped or permitted. It is the water-side analogue of the tax-side findings documented under [[Agricultural Use Classification]].