This student story was published as part of the 2026 NASW Perlman Virtual Mentoring Program organized by the NASW Education Committee, providing science journalism experience for undergraduate and graduate students.
Story by Dhanvini Gudi
Mentored and edited by Nora Bradford
Data centers are popping up all over America to meet the anticipated demands of the AI industry. Along with them, communities are protesting the arrival of this resource-hungry infrastructure in their backyards, due to their pollution and high electricity and water demands. To minimize the impact on communities, data centers could instead be built away from them – in abandoned mines.
Shallow, man-made pools within these mines could be especially useful for cooling data centers, according to a recent research paper by Zhongyang He and his collaborators from Penn State University. A strong motivator to use these pools is that the water is naturally cool year-round, according to the paper.
“Unlike shallow natural lakes or rivers whose temperatures fluctuate with the seasons, the water in abandoned mine pit pools is primarily filled by nearby groundwater seepage, providing a highly reliable cold source of water,” said He.
He and his team studied the cooling capacity these kinds of pools could provide by simulating the heat transfer between the pool and the environment and considering several factors that could influence this.
Using abandoned mines as sites for data centers is not a new idea -- there have been several attempts at using these lands over the last few years. One of the most prominent was the Iron Mountain data center, which was built in Pennsylvania by repurposing an abandoned limestone mine. These projects are also being commissioned in other states such as Virginia and Kentucky.
The benefits of using these sites for data centers are several, according to He. These mine lands have existing infrastructure ranging from power plants with transmission lines already connected along with roads and physical space that can be used to construct facilities. Plus, the land is cheaper to acquire. The naturally cool water connected to these mines is another asset. Most current projects use (or propose to use) deep sea cooling or groundwater cooling for this purpose, which are harder to access and have limited capacity for cooling.
In their paper, He and his team chose a specific abandoned mine land in eastern Pennsylvania. They chose this particular site because it served as a representative data point – with a surface pit pool around 0.1 km2 in size, roughly equal to 19 football fields. It contains leftover industrial infrastructure like roads, and even a high power line.
He and his collaborators first developed a heat transfer model to account for the different ways the heat can travel between the pool water and the environment. They then took publicly available data like air temperature, wind speed, and surface temperature of the specific site over a period of 10 years and used it in their model to estimate the cooling capacity of the pool.
The team was interested in exploring two ways data centers cool their servers: air cooling and water or liquid cooling. Air cooling is the process where air is cooled and flowed through the data center rooms. Water cooling refers to the process of flowing cold water inside metal plates that are in direct contact with servers – a process that is much more efficient.
They estimated that 0.1 to 0.2 km² pools would have a cooling capacity of around 10 to 20 megawatts with air cooling and at least 30 megawatts with water cooling. For reference, these ranges are well suited for average data centers across the U.S., and even larger “hyperscale” data centers. When combined with conventional evaporative cooling systems, these pools could provide up to 60 megawatts of cooling capacity.
“Abandoned mine lands, especially coal mines, contain contaminated surface pit pools caused by acid mine drainage,” said Brian Schwartz, a researcher in the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, who was not involved in the research. The paper suggests that if data center projects were commissioned here, they could work with local governments on cost-sharing arrangements to treat this water for their cooling needs, benefiting surrounding communities that otherwise bear the consequences of untreated drainage. These data centers may also offer employment for communities, though typically these are offered during the construction phase and not so much after the data centers are operational. Zhongyang He thinks that these factors might help quell “nimbyism” – opposition from communities living around the proposed data center projects.
While the idea of using abandoned mine sites for data centers sounds good on paper, it does not make it less harmful for people living around them. Because they will be in remote, underpopulated areas, it might just reduce how many people are impacted.
“The primary mode of energy generation for data centers continues to be through fossil fuels, whose emissions cause severe air pollution in the area, harming the health of communities who live near them,” warned Schwartz. Until this is changed, by switching energy generation from fossil fuels to cleaner renewable energy sources, large-scale data center projects will continue to meet resistance from the general public.
The researchers acknowledge that these simulations are a starting point, and further studies are required to fully realize the prospects of using shallow pit pools for data center cooling. However, they are hopeful that approaches like this could allow us to reclaim scarred land and sustainably build novel technologies within the existing frameworks.
Main Image Caption: Aerial photograph of an opencast mine in the Athabasca Oil Sands, Alberta, Canada. The Athabasca oil reserves are among the largest in the world. Credit: David Nunuk / Science Photo Library.
Dhanvini Gudi is a PhD candidate studying planetary science. She works on novel materials for solar photovoltaics in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. She is passionate about communicating science through short-form videos and articles. You can find her on Instagram at @dhanviniexplores, Youtube at Dhanvini Explores, her website https://dhanvinig.github.io/dhanvinigudi/, or email her at dhanvini.gudi@gmail.com.
Nora Bradford is a science writer focused on neuroscience, psychology, and biology. She has a BS in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy from University of Chicago and a PhD in cognitive science from University of California, Irvine. She’s a faculty member in the Critical Writing program at University of Pennsylvania, and her writing has appeared in Scientific American, Science News, Quanta Magazine, and National Geographic. She has also dipped her toes into script writing for a PBS Terra series and for SciShow. You can find her work at norabradford.com.
The NASW Perlman Virtual Mentoring program is named for longtime science writer and past NASW President David Perlman. Dave, who died in 2020 at the age of 101 only three years after his retirement from the San Francisco Chronicle, was a mentor to countless members of the science writing community and always made time for kind and supportive words, especially for early career writers.
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