A company proposing a massive West Plains data center has little history, spurring outcry from concerned residents

The company proposing to build a massive data center on the West Plains has sought partners from here to Southern California to help it build facilities to produce the hydrogen that it promises will revolutionize fuel for everything from aircraft to buses.

But Apricus Energy Partners, which was formed only three years ago, doesn’t appear to have ever built a thing.

Online sources indicate it has fewer than 11 employees. Its founder and president, Sean P. Boyd, says that the company is now based in Spokane.

But its listed address in the Lilac City is a P.O. Box.

Boyd originally founded the company in 2023 in Surprise, Arizona, according to Washington state records. But according to Arizona records, Boyd terminated the limited liability company there at the end of 2023.

The address listed as the Surprise headquarters of Apricus Energy Partners is not a large factory or even a building in an industrial site. It’s a house with a terracotta-tile roof in a Surprise subdivision: Boyd’s home.

But Boyd, apparently, had a willing partner in Spokane County Commissioner Al French when he pitched a grand plan to build a state-of-the art hydrogen production facility and data center on 514 acres of land on the West Plains, located at 11703 W. Medical Lake Highway.

Based on records provided to The Spokesman-Review by a stay-at-home mom who put in an information request with the county, the facility could eventually use up to 1,000 megawatts of power for a data center that would provide Apricus the financial support to build a next-generation hydrogen fuel facility.

“The hydrogen is my goal, not the data center. The data center is ancillary,” French said last month. “If all they had to offer was a data center, I mean, good luck. But that’s what they’re doing. It’s the hydrogen that’s my attraction.”

But that data center portion of the proposal is exactly what many local residents don’t want.

Public outcry

On July 30, the Spokane County Planning Commission arrived to discuss ongoing efforts to update its comprehensive plan.

Instead, board members found an angry crowd of residents who implored the board to stop the data center from coming to the West Plains.

Some broke down in tears as they spoke about how a data center would threaten their water supplies and negatively impact their property values.

“It’s time we wake up and realize what’s going on,” said Shawna Robinson of Airway Heights. “These data centers pollute everything. I know there’s a million other reasons to not have them. Mine is our children and our health.”

Many of the speakers expressed concern that the data center could exacerbate existing groundwater contamination from PFAS, a chemical with a legacy of pollution in the West Plains caused by firefighting exercises at the Spokane International Airport and nearby Fairchild Air Force Base.

Robinson also doesn’t believe the data centers, which French supports coming here, would add that many jobs.

“They just bring money for the elite and not the community,” Robinson said. “The people with land that is within 5 miles of these data centers, they’re not gonna be able to sell their home. They’re gonna be upside down in them because no one wants to live close to these things.”

Adrianne Nott, of Spokane Valley, said the county would saddle the community with a problem that could plague the region for years.

“This project is going to be taking from the community more electricity than every residential customer in the county, as well as chewing through millions of gallons of water every day,” Nott said. “We’re being asked to hand over our critical infrastructure and our good reliability and our natural resources to feed these servers.

“Even more alarming is the long-term-compounding obligations from a project this size,” she continued. “We are locking our region into decades of massive energy and water commitments for a rapidly expanding tech bubble while local residents potentially get stuck footing the bill and dealing with the relentless noise, air pollution and infrastructure strain.

“I urge the commission to support a moratorium to reject this,” Nott concluded.

One of the planning commissioners tried.

Logan Camporeale put forth a motion on July 30 to have the planning commission consider asking the Spokane County Commission to place a moratorium on data centers until the county could update rules for how they are developed.

“This item is not on our agenda, and so we really don’t have a ton of authority to make any action on it,” Camporeale said. “But I think we can make a motion to suspend the rules, to pass a moratorium recommendation, and so I’m gonna do that.

“I move to suspend the rules, so that we can discuss a moratorium on data centers or making a recommendation on a moratorium on data centers until we can complete our cost-planning process.”

The motion failed.

But commissioners already considered a moratorium similar to what the Spokane City leaders enacted last month.

However, commissioners were split on how to proceed. Its three Republican commissioners voiced opposition to any moratorium, and two Democrat commissioners voted in favor of the move.

On July 21, Spokane County Commission Chair Mary Brooks postponed the vote until later this month, but she said she believed that any county hold on projects for any duration would be bad for business.

“When you say moratorium, I think it says we’re closed for business,” Brooks said. “And we’re not closed for business, whether it’s data centers or any of it.”

At the meeting on July 30, County Planning Director Scott Chesney said the county currently has no specific regulations that cover data centers, which fuel the ever-growing need for processing power to support the AI data race.

He noted that the county has no current proposals being considered. And that includes Apricus’ Rock Point data center pitch.

“This is on our radar, so to speak, to try to create zoning code and specific guidelines for this as part of a plan by the end of the year, regardless of the board’s decision on how they move forward,” Chesney said. “We’re accumulating data. We’re looking at best practices, and we’re going to have something to share with you somewhere later in the year.”

The technology

In an interview last month, Boyd, the Apricus founder, said that Rock Point could use two methods to produce hydrogen: electrolysis, which splits water into hydrogen and oxygen, and methane pyrolysis, which splits methane from natural gas into hydrogen and carbon.

Electrolysis would use wastewater or treated water, not groundwater, meaning the processes wouldn’t tap the aquifer, he said.

Boyd did not respond to multiple requests last week seeking more information about his company’s plans.

The intention of the processes, Boyd said last month, is to create clean energy and carbon-neutrality. Boyd said the method could produce alternative energies for transportation or replace diesel fuel.

In answers to questions from leaders from the Spokane Tribe and Kalispel Tribe of Indians, Boyd wrote that Apricus could secure wastewater from Airway Heights.

“It is our understanding that groundwater in the area is significantly contaminated with at a minimum, PFAS and possibly other” pollutants, he wrote. “Apricus would look to treat this ground water and utilize. Dependent on cost and complexity, a suitably sized treatment facility could allow additional groundwater back to the city for onward community use.”

Commissioner Al French last week said Apricus approached him last year with details about how its processes would work.

Apricus, he said, was the fourth company seeking to build a data center on the West Plains, and that doesn’t count the company that signed a memorandum of understanding with Avista for a 500 megawatt data center that French said was going to go somewhere in north Spokane County.

“I know they’re based out of Arizona and they have an expertise in the hydrogen area,” French said of Apricus. “I’ve met with their engineers and, you know, I told them … you got to pay for all the infrastructure cost yourself.

“You cannot tap into the aquifer. And you cannot pass any cost on to the ratepayers,” French continued. “And so they said, ‘Not a problem, not a problem. We can do all of those.’ ”

But many of those community members who spoke on July 30, cried foul on those promises.

Mark Hendren, from Spokane County, said he believe the public was kept in the dark as Apricus lobbied county officials to support the plan and to obtain tax breaks for the project.

“This data center just kind of came out of nowhere,” he said. French “was working on it, evidently, but nobody else seemed to know about it. They’ll be using aquifer water. We already have problems with water. This should be brought to the people for a vote, as far as I’m concerned.”

Zachariah Isom, who lives on the West Plains, said he shared Hendren’s concerns about potential new sources of water and air pollution. He, too, asked the commissioners to enact a moratorium on data centers.

“There’s some other concerns as well, including noise pollution,” he said. “We don’t know how severe some of these impacts would be on our local resources, including our land, water and air.”

Amanda Parrish, executive director of the Lands Council, said in a news release that the turnout for the planning commission meeting showed why county leaders should take more time to develop policies that protect area water and impacts on neighborhoods and agricultural lands.

“The extraordinary public turnout demonstrates that Spokane County residents want to be part of this conversation before decisions are made,” Parrish wrote.

Livermore no more

The West Plains is not the first Apricus project to promise big returns.

Boyd, who attended Nova Scotia Community College, pitched a deal in 2024 in California to build a hydrogen fuel production facility on land owned by the Livermore Municipal Airport, located next to a town nestled northeast of San Jose and east of Oakland.

As part of that deal, Apricus promised to build solar panels on 140 acres of airport land.

The solar power would then be used to produce the hydrogen that could be used for fuel cells that could, in theory, combine hydrogen fuel with oxygen to power future electric airplane motors.

In February 2024, Boyd told the Independent, a weekly newspaper in Livermore, that he expected to start work on the 140 acres of solar panels by mid-2026, or basically now.

But Paula Freyaldenhoven, assistant airport manager at Livermore Municipal Airport, said in an interview last week that she couldn’t remember ever working with Apricus Energy Partners.

“Pete Sandhu over at Five Rivers Aviation was researching a development along those lines,” she said. “They wanted to put (solar panels) around all the hangars. We did not accept it. It’s dead.”

Boyd got a similar response earlier this year from the Kalispel Tribe.

Brandon Haugen, project and development analyst for the Kalispel Tribe, said Apricus Energy Partners approached tribal leaders last winter.

“We had a handful of meetings with Apricus and some of the folks. They were interested in developing a facility that would help provide energy to support the Big Rock project,” Haugen said.

As part of the proposal, which would be built on tribal land, Apricus suggested that the tribe could retain an ownership stake.

“It was highly conceptual. They were interested in developing a portion of the tribe’s land,” Haugen said. “We looked at it and decided we weren’t going to pursue it.”

He noted that Apricus only wanted a hydrogen generation facility, using natural gas.

“The data center was completely separate,” he said. “There was nothing (proposed) on our property that had anything to do with a data center. This was a concept where they could build energy production to support the data center.”

According to county records, Apricus would eventually seek 1,000 megawatts of electricity.

However, those records show that Avista Utilities’ engineering study determined that only about 50 megawatts could be delivered by 2030 and up to 650 megawatts by 2033, assuming the company pays about $184 million for new transmission lines, substations and interconnections.

“Full deliver of 1,000 megawatts would require additional regional infrastructure or new generation beyond the scope of the study,” the analysis reads.

On Wednesday, Airway Heights City Manager Albert Tripp said that the city has engaged with Apricus about its proposal to use wastewater for data center and hydrogen production facility.

“At this time, (city officials have) had a few meetings with the company to better understand the scope of their request,” Tripp wrote in a news release. “No decisions or agreements have been made about this proposal.”

As part of its effort, Airway Heights officials now are seeking an independent engineering firm to evaluate the feasibility of providing reclaimed water for the project. The study is expected to take about a year and cost $163,000. Apricus apparently has agreed to cover the cost of that study, Tripp wrote.

“We understand that members of the community may have questions about the proposal and what it could mean for Airway Heights,” Tripp said in the release. “We will share information as it becomes available and will provide opportunities for the community to learn more.”

Haugen, of the Kalispel Tribe, said he never asked Boyd where Apricus’ funding would come from for such a large project.

“We didn’t get that far into the weeds,” he said. “For the tribe, it was about asking the right questions. Is this something we want to explore? No, we were not interested.”