CLINTONVILLE, Venango County — As Keel Infrastructure looks to build a gigawatt-scale data center at the former site of a waste coal power plant, its first interaction with the community on the project was generally met with distrust.

However, according to executive vice president of operations Alex Brammer, that distrust was expected and warranted.

“We realize that we are starting off at zero trust, and we get that. Some of that is our fault, and some of that is the data center industry’s fault... I’m not asking you to trust us right now. I’m asking you to just listen to me,” he said.

Keel Infrastructure hosted its first round of community engagement sessions with Venango County residents Tuesday, Sept. 22. The sessions are planned as the first step toward building inroads with the community while the company looks to convert their Scrubgrass site into a data center.

The proposed location is about 6 miles north of Butler County and about 7 miles from Emlenton.

Brammer, who led Tuesday’s presentations, said discussions about the future facility are happening before the company even begins applying for necessary permits to help inform the community of what might be coming.

“You are here because you have valid concerns about something potentially large that’s coming into your community and concerns around noise, water and the environment,” he said.

He detailed the company’s plan to turn 300 acres of property into an as much as a 1.3 gigawatt data center which will then be leased out to another company. However, no official plan for the size of the potential center has been prepared as of yet.

“Until we have that, we’re not going to be able to say exactly how many folks we staff in the facility. We’re not going to be able to say exactly how many construction workers,” Brammer said.

Despite lacking specifics, he said, based on data from similar sized centers, he estimates work will generate around 2,000 full-time construction jobs per year during the construction phase, with as much as 9,800 indirect or induced jobs to support the influx.

He said Keel is looking to construct the facility between 2027 and 2032, with the hope partial operations can begin as soon as 2029.

After construction and at full operation, Brammer claimed the facility could employ around 600 full-time jobs. He also noted that while those jobs tend to range on the more technical side, the company will look to train members of the local community.

“We can take someone off the street — if they pass a background check and have certain minimum qualifications — and we can train them in roughly six to 12 months to have enough knowledge to join the team as a level one technician,” he said.

He added the proposed project will meet newly-enacted Governor’s Responsible Infrastructure Development requirements.

He said the proposed facility would use a closed-loop cooling system to minimize water usage. To visualize this, the company’s presentation showed a comparison of water used in an evaporative cooling system compared to closed-loop, but did not include specific statistics.

Plans to monitor and control light pollution and noise pollution were also discussed.

Brammer said the company is looking “very closely” at converting the waste coal plant into an up to 550 megawatt natural gas plant.

County residents attending Tuesday’s afternoon session were not quick to accept Brammer’s words for truth.

Chief among concerns was noise pollution, as Keel Infrastructure — formerly known as Bitfarms — operated a Bitcoin mining farm at the facility until June. One attendee said he is urging Keel to do extensive noise studies to avoid creating as much noise pollution as the farm did.

“If you stand on the side of the river where (Scrubgrass) is at, the plant is silent. You can’t hear a thing. You cross the river to (Rockland Township), it’s like it’s in your house,” he said.

Brammer said the company will look into modeling the noise profile of the facility using speakers and measuring the noise from “sensitive receptor sites,” such as homes and schools, both in Scrubgrass and Rockland townships.

Another concern among attendees was a large pile of coal ash on the facility grounds. The state Department of Environmental Protection has already issued a consent order regarding.

“We fell in on an asset 18 months ago that has a lot of very unfortunate history. We are now responsible for cleaning that up and we’re doing the best we absolutely can,” Brammer said.

Another attendee asked Brammer why the community should trust Keel. He called into question the company’s honesty and the accuracy of statistics such as water usage and employment.

“For instance, your presentation on the water usage. All your little dots in that are meaningless. ‘Well, look, we only use three dots. And look, they’d use this many dots.’ That’s meaningless,” the attendee said.

Brammer said until there is a plan for the facility, he cannot give a real statistic on water usage in good faith.

Another attendee asked whether the company considered using clean, renewable energy to power the center. Brammer said Shapiro’s executive order stipulates a percentage of energy to be renewable, scaling to 32% by 2035, but would not consider building clean energy infrastructure on the property.

“There’s not enough land to build a solar farm there and I would be even more nervous about this discussion today if I was going to propose building a big wind farm in your community,” he said.

Questions continued for some time on issues ranging from vegetation to tax abatement to where the facility will get its energy from.

Brammer reminded the audience the sessions are just the first in a monthslong process toward planning and applying for permits.

“I will be back and you guys, over a couple months, are going to get really tired of hearing from me. But keep track. Keep a scorecard of what we’re doing,” he said.

Two attendees, Pat and Curt Marvin, of Oil City, said they attended to hear firsthand what Keel had to say and what questions and concerns residents had. Ultimately, they were left unsure how to feel.

“To hear some of these people saying how many things were promised and didn’t happen like they should’ve,” Curt Marvin said. “It makes you wonder about all this new stuff coming up. How honest are these people?”

Pat Marvin said the session was educational and left her hopeful that a data center won’t necessarily end in a negative impact.

“I think I came away believing that it’s inevitable. These things are coming. I also felt hopeful that it doesn’t mean it has to spell the demise of our community. It could end up being a good thing,” she said.

They agreed the most important thing is data centers have firm guardrails to curtail the concerns they heard. They also agreed they will be informing others of what they heard during the session and communicating with municipal and county leaders about the shape data centers take.

“You can either be part of the problem or part of the solution,” Pat Marvin said.

Two more community engagement sessions are planned for Wednesday: one from 9 to 11 a.m. and the other from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Clintonville Fire Hall, 501 Emlenton St.