On the Ohio River floodplain near Point Pleasant, the Monarch Compute Campus is asking West Virginia regulators to sign off on filling more wetlands. WV Rivers Coalition is asking everyone else to tell WVDEP no, and the comment period has been extended while a public hearing gets scheduled.
WVDEP is weighing a Section 401 water quality certification for additional wetland impacts at the Monarch Compute Campus, a gas-powered data center complex under construction in Mason County, West Virginia. WV Rivers Coalition is urging comments asking WVDEP to deny the certification. The comment deadline has been extended, with a new date to be announced once a public hearing is set.
What is being built
The Monarch project is large by any measure. Reporting in the Charleston Gazette-Mail describes three buildings powered by nearly 1,000 natural gas and diesel engines, with the builder aiming to have the campus operational in early 2027. It sits on the Ohio River in Mason County, in the kind of flat riverside terrain that, not coincidentally, is where wetlands tend to be.
Under Section 401 of the Clean Water Act, a project that needs a federal permit to fill wetlands also needs the state to certify that the work will not violate water quality standards. That certification is the decision now in front of WVDEP, and it is one of the few points in the process where the state, and the public, can say no or attach conditions.
Natural gas and diesel generators planned across the Monarch campus’s three buildings, per reporting in the Gazette-Mail.
Why wetlands, why now
Floodplain wetlands along the Ohio do quiet, unglamorous work: they store floodwater, filter runoff before it reaches the river, and hold some of the last good habitat on a stretch of river that industry claimed a century ago. Fill them and the water they held shows up somewhere else, usually in somebody’s basement during the next high-water spring. WV Rivers’ position is that the certification for additional impacts should be denied, and the group has set up a comment page for residents who agree.
The extended deadline is an opening, not a resolution. WVDEP has indicated a public hearing will be announced, and the new comment deadline will follow from that. Groups that want to weigh in have time to do it well.
Data centers are becoming a water story everywhere
Mason County is not an outlier. Mountain Watershed Association held a town hall on proposed data center development in Fayette County, Pennsylvania on September 14, and projects are surfacing across the basin wherever gas, land, and transmission meet. Each one arrives with its own water questions: wetland fill, water withdrawals for cooling, stormwater from big rooftops and pads. The Monarch certification is simply the first one in our region to reach a formal public comment stage on water grounds.
Why it matters for the rest of us
Whatever a group thinks about data centers in general, the 401 process is where water quality gets defended in particular. A denied or conditioned certification at Monarch would tell every developer eyeing the basin that wetlands are not free real estate. A rubber stamp would say the opposite. Either way, the precedent for the next dozen projects is being set now, one comment at a time.
Based on WV Rivers Coalition action alerts of September 15, 2026 and its September 2026 newsletter, and reporting by the Charleston Gazette-Mail on the Monarch project. Current as of September 25, 2026.
