The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's Office of Energy Projects has issued a final environmental impact statement for the Seminoe Pumped Storage Project, a proposed 972-megawatt facility that Black Canyon Hydro, LLC wants to build at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Seminoe Reservoir on the North Platte River in Carbon County, Wyoming. The notice of availability, published in the Federal Register on June 18, 2026 under Project No. 14787-004, marks the point at which FERC's staff has completed its environmental review of the license application and placed the analysis on the public record. For a project of this scale, the final EIS is the document the Commission will lean on when it decides whether to issue a license.

The project's location ties it directly to existing federal water infrastructure. The notice states that the facility would sit at Reclamation's Seminoe Reservoir, roughly 35 miles northeast of Rawlins, and would occupy 1,043.9 acres of Bureau of Land Management land, 88.2 acres managed by Reclamation, and 831.7 acres of private land. Pumped storage works by moving water between two reservoirs at different elevations — pumping uphill when power is cheap and abundant, then releasing it through turbines when demand and prices climb — which is why these projects are increasingly framed as long-duration storage that can absorb surplus wind and solar output.

"The 972-megawatt project would be located at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's (Reclamation) Seminoe Reservoir on the North Platte River in Carbon County, Wyoming, approximately 35 miles northeast of Rawlins, Wyoming."— Federal Register, FERC Notice of Availability (Project No. 14787-004), source

Eight cooperating agencies built the record

The breadth of the agency participation is one of the distinguishing features of this docket. According to the notice, the EIS was prepared with the cooperation of Reclamation, the BLM, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Western Area Power Administration, the Saratoga-Encampment-Rawlins Conservation District, the Medicine Bow Conservation District, and the Carbon County Board of Commissioners, all acting as cooperating agencies. That roster reflects how many jurisdictions a pumped-storage project on a federal reservoir touches at once — water management, federal land, fish and wildlife, navigable-waters permitting, federal power marketing, and county-level land use.

FERC's staff prepared the document under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 and the Commission's regulations at 18 CFR part 380. The notice describes the final EIS as an analysis of the applicant's proposal and the alternatives for licensing the project, documenting the views of governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, affected Native American Tribes, the public, the license applicant, and Commission staff. In other words, the document is meant to consolidate the full range of input the Commission received during the proceeding into a single analytical record.

Where the docket stands

Issuance of a final EIS does not by itself grant a license; it is the environmental foundation on which a licensing decision is built. The notice directs readers to the full EIS on FERC's eLibrary system, accessible by entering the docket number without its last three digits, and points the public to the Commission's Office of Public Participation for help filing interventions, comments, or requests for rehearing. The document was signed by Secretary Debbie-Anne A. Reese and dated June 12, 2026, with Michael Tust of the Office of Energy Projects listed as the staff contact.

For readers tracking the pumped-storage pipeline, the Seminoe docket is a useful data point on what a large project's environmental review actually entails. The figures the notice puts on the record — 972 megawatts of capacity, more than 1,963 acres of project lands split across federal and private ownership, and a siting decision built around an existing Reclamation reservoir — are the parameters the licensing decision will be measured against. Pumped storage remains the largest installed category of grid-scale energy storage in the United States by far, and new projects of this size are comparatively rare; most of the existing fleet was built decades ago. A completed final EIS does not guarantee that the Seminoe project advances to a license or to construction, but it moves the docket past the most resource-intensive stage of FERC's review and sets up the Commission's decision on the application.

The siting choice the notice describes is part of what makes the docket distinctive. Rather than impounding a new river reach, the project is designed around an existing federal reservoir — Seminoe — which is why Reclamation appears both as the landowner for 88.2 acres and as a cooperating agency on the EIS. Building at an existing reservoir is a recurring strategy in the current wave of proposed pumped-storage projects, because it reuses water infrastructure that already exists rather than requiring an entirely new impoundment. The trade-off the cooperating-agency roster makes visible is that a project on a Reclamation reservoir on a federal river still has to satisfy water-management, fish-and-wildlife, and navigable-waters reviews simultaneously, which is precisely the kind of multi-jurisdiction coordination the final EIS is meant to resolve into a single record.

The land-ownership split the notice itemizes is also a window into the permitting work behind the document. With 1,043.9 acres of BLM land, 88.2 acres of Reclamation land, and 831.7 acres of private land inside the project boundary, the EIS had to reconcile federal land-management requirements with private property interests across more than 1,963 acres. Each of those categories carries its own approval pathway, and the presence of the Western Area Power Administration among the cooperating agencies points to the interconnection-and-transmission dimension of moving 972 megawatts of pumped-storage output onto the regional grid. None of those threads is resolved by the EIS alone, but the document is where they are analyzed together.

What the record establishes is concrete and bounded. The Office of Energy Projects has reviewed the license application, prepared the final EIS with eight cooperating agencies, and made the analysis available to the public. The next moves belong to the Commission, which will weigh the EIS in deciding the license, and to any party that wants to file comments or a request for rehearing. For a project that would add nearly a gigawatt of dispatchable long-duration storage to the Western grid, the document released this week is the analytical record that decision will rest on.