04/30/2026
From the Uinta Basin Railway to Nine Mile Data, LLC: How Special Interest Groups in Lab Coats Are Threatening Our Community's Future
An opinion article by Mike Stengel
There is a pattern playing out across rural Utah, and the Uintah Basin has been one of its primary targets. A collection of well-organized, well-funded activist organizations has made it their mission to oppose virtually every energy and infrastructure project that sustains our community and our livelihoods. They do it with slick branding, emotional press releases, and — most effectively — the borrowed credibility of doctors and scientists. They put people in lab coats out front, call themselves things like Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment or HEAL Utah, and dare you to disagree with a physician. This is not science. It is politics wearing labcoats.
Who Are These Groups?
The two most prominent organizations fighting against development in our Basin are Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment (UPHE) and HEAL Utah (Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah).
UPHE was founded in 2007 by Dr. Brian Moench, a board-certified anesthesiologist who describes himself as a political activist as much as a physician. UPHE claims to be "the largest civic organization of health care professionals in the state," with over 430 physicians and more than 3,500 members of the public. The key word there is public. This is not a medical association reviewing clinical trials. It is a politically active nonprofit that uses the physician title as a credibility shield to advance an anti-fossil-fuel agenda. Dr. Moench has authored over 145 op-eds and openly describes his work as "pollution, politics, and persuasion" — not medicine.
HEAL Utah, formally the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, has operated since 1999 and has grown from a grassroots chemical weapons opposition group into a full-scale environmental lobbying organization with over 20,000 supporters. They operate at the Utah State Legislature, file or support lawsuits, and run public pressure campaigns targeting energy projects, infrastructure, and now, technology developments like data centers. They called the Uinta Basin Railway a "boondoggle" and openly celebrated the court ruling that temporarily stopped its construction.
These groups are joined on specific campaigns by national organizations like the Center for Biological Diversity, WildEarth Guardians, Sierra Club, and Living Rivers — all of whom either filed or co-signed lawsuits against the Uinta Basin Railway.
When Activists Tried to Kill the Study Before It Started
I attended the Utah Permanent Community Impact Fund Board (CIB) meeting as representatives of the local media at the Red Cliffs Lodge in Moab, Utah on on Thursday, November 7, 2019. The CIB is the state board that administers oil and mineral royalties, distributing them back to rural Utah communities to fund hospitals, roads, water systems, and infrastructure — the very definition of public funds serving the public good.
The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition had applied for CIB funding to cover pre-construction planning and the formal environmental review process for the Uinta Basin Railway. In other words, they were asking for funding to do the homework — to conduct the engineering studies, the regulatory reviews, and ultimately the Environmental Impact Statement that would determine whether the project was viable and how to build it responsibly.
What we observed at that meeting was revealing — and it had nothing to do with the environment.
Organized opposition groups showed up not to improve the process, not to ensure a rigorous environmental review — but to stop the funding for the study before the study could even begin. The Center for Biological Diversity had submitted a formal letter to the CIB Board the very day before a key funding vote, demanding the board deny the grant. Environmental groups argued the CIB should not fund the planning process because the railway would eventually move oil.
Let that register. They were not opposing a completed project with a known footprint. They were trying to prevent the state from funding the environmental review that would determine the project's footprint in the first place. They wanted to shut down the study that exists to protect the environment — in the name of protecting the environment.
That is the central hypocrisy that deserves to be named plainly. These organizations hold themselves out as defenders of environmental rigor. They demand environmental review of every project. They file lawsuits when they believe the review is insufficient. And yet when a rural community of seven counties seeks funding to conduct that very review — to do the work that the law requires and that responsible development demands — these same groups show up to stop the money from being spent on the science.
What made it worse was watching how they did it. They did not show up alone. They came with locals — our neighbors, well-meaning people from our own communities — who had been worked up into a genuine state of alarm over environmental concerns that had no basis in established fact. Concerns about water contamination. Concerns about air quality. Concerns about wildlife corridors. Real-sounding, scary-sounding issues that any reasonable person would care about — and every single one of them the kind of question that the environmental review process exists specifically to answer.
That is the tactic. Identify the fears that resonate in a rural community. Amplify them without context. Leave out the part where those exact concerns are required by federal law to be studied, modeled, mitigated, and publicly reviewed before a single shovel breaks ground on any significant infrastructure project — public, private, or a combination of both. The locals in that room did not know that. They were not told that. They were handed a grievance and pointed at a microphone, and the organizations behind them counted on the emotional energy in the room to do their political work for them.
This is fear over facts. It is a deliberate strategy. These groups understand the regulatory process better than almost anyone in the room — they employ attorneys who specialize in it. They know that downstream environmental questions get addressed downstream in the process. They know that a CIB funding vote for pre-construction planning is not the moment when water quality gets decided. But their local recruits do not know that, and informing them would undercut the outrage. So they stay quiet about how the process actually works and let manufactured panic fill the void.
The question almost asks itself: Why would a group that claims to care about environmental outcomes try to shut down the funding for the environmental impact study designed to identify and mitigate those impacts?
Because the study was never the point. The outcome was the point. These groups had already decided the answer — no railway — and the EIS process was simply an obstacle standing between them and that predetermined conclusion. If the science came back and showed the railway could be built responsibly, that result was unacceptable to them. So the safest move was to prevent the science from being done at all. You cannot claim to stand for a healthy environment and simultaneously try to stop the very process that protects it.
The Uinta Basin Railway is an 88-mile rail line designed to connect the oil fields of northeastern Utah to the national freight network. It is a public-private partnership supported by a coalition of seven Utah counties, the Rio Grande Pacific Corporation, and the Ute Indian Tribe, which holds a 5% ownership stake in the project. If completed, the railway would allow Uinta Basin producers to access Gulf Coast refineries capable of processing the region's high-wax crude oil, quadrupling production capacity and unleashing an economic development opportunity that the Basin has waited decades for.
The Surface Transportation Board approved the railway in December 2021 after a 3,600-page Environmental Impact Statement. That was not good enough for the activist groups.
In February 2022, UPHE, along with the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club, WildEarth Guardians, and Living Rivers, sued the U.S. Surface Transportation Board in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Their argument? The Board should have analyzed not just the impact of building the railway itself, but also the downstream environmental consequences of all the additional oil that might someday be produced and burned because of the railway. In other words, they wanted a federal agency to assign blame for hypothetical future emissions from production that hadn't occurred yet — and deny an infrastructure project on that basis.
They filed a second lawsuit in September 2022 against the U.S. Forest Service over the railway's 12-mile path through a section of the Ashley National Forest. That suit claimed the Forest Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to assess the climate impacts of the oil the railway would one day carry.
In August 2023, the D.C. Circuit Court sided with the environmental groups and halted construction. HEAL Utah celebrated the ruling.
The Supreme Court Disagreed — 8 to 0
On May 29, 2025, the United States Supreme Court reversed that ruling in a unanimous 8-0 decision. The case, Seven County Infrastructure Coalition et al. v. Eagle County et al., found that the D.C. Circuit had "failed to afford the Board the substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases" and had "incorrectly interpreted NEPA to require the Board to consider the environmental effects of upstream and downstream projects that are separate in time or place from the Uinta Basin Railway."
Let that sink in. Eight justices — including both liberal and conservative members of the Supreme Court — agreed that these groups had stretched environmental law beyond recognition to block a project. The court drew a clear line: the job of a federal agency reviewing an 88-mile railroad is to review that railroad — not to serve as a global climate policy arbiter for all possible future consequences of oil that might someday be extracted and burned.
"This decision affirms the years of work and collaboration that have gone into making the Uinta Basin Railway a reality," said Keith Heaton, Director of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition. "It represents a turning point for rural Utah."
Sevier County Commissioner Greg Jensen put it even more plainly: "This decision will also support future water and road projects. It also discourages frivolous lawsuits from environmental groups that have worked to prevent the development of affordable energy costs for the state, region, and the United States as a whole."
Apply Their Logic to the Last 50 Years
UPHE's Dr. Moench publicly stated that the railway's primary beneficiaries would be "a handful of CEOs of oil companies who have already manipulated Utah lawmakers into giving them public subsidies, whose objective is to exhaust this unique oil resource as fast as they can, to make as much money as fast as they can."
That is a profound insult to the families of the Uintah Basin who have built lives, businesses, and communities on the back of this region's energy economy — and who deserve the right to transport their product to competitive markets.
Apply UPHE's same logic to the last 50 years of oil and gas development in our Basin. If every barrel of oil extracted had to pass a test requiring federal agencies to account for global downstream emissions — including from distant refineries the oil might someday reach — none of it would have been approved. Not the Uintah Basin's oil boom of the 1980s. Not the production ramp-up of the 2000s. Not the waxy crude infrastructure that today supports hospital funding, school budgets, and county roads across Duchesne and Uintah counties. All of it would have been litigated into the ground by the same strategy these groups used against the railway.
The communities they claim to protect — the rural families, the indigenous Ute Tribe, the small business owners — would have no economic base from which to sustain a future at all.
Virtue Signaling Behind a Lab Coat
The "lab coat strategy" is not unique to Utah. It is a nationwide tactic used by activist organizations to elevate their political positions into something that sounds clinical and irrefutable. Place a doctor in front of the cameras, add "Physicians" or "Health" to the name of your organization, and suddenly opposition to a railroad sounds like opposition to cancer. Disagree, and you're accused of ignoring science.
But UPHE's own founder described his work as the intersection of "pollution, politics, and persuasion" — not medicine. Their activities are lobbying, not diagnostics. Filing lawsuits is not the same as prescribing treatment. Celebrating a court ruling that delays a billion-dollar infrastructure project is not a clinical outcome — it is a political victory for an ideological agenda that views all fossil fuel development as inherently wrong, regardless of economic context or community need.
This is the same phenomenon many Utahns experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. No example illustrates the danger of conflating a person with a discipline better than Dr. Anthony Fauci's now-infamous declaration on CBS' Face the Nation in November 2021. When asked about Republican critics, Fauci said: "They're really criticizing science because I represent science. That's dangerous." He later reinforced the sentiment even more bluntly, telling reporters: "Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science."
This is not how science works. Science is a process of hypothesis, challenge, revision, and debate. No individual human being — regardless of how many decades they have spent in government service or how many peer-reviewed papers they have published — is the embodiment of scientific truth. Sen. Ted Cruz captured the problem precisely when he said Fauci's posture represented "a delusion of grandeur" and that no one had "hurt the credibility of doctors more than Dr. Fauci" by being political and partisan while simultaneously claiming to be beyond question. Even commentators who defended Fauci's public health work acknowledged that declaring yourself the personification of science is "profoundly wrong and unhelpful" because it invites exactly the kind of credibility collapse it was meant to prevent.
When policy decisions are wrapped in the authority of credentialed professionals and those credentials are used to shut down debate rather than inform it, communities lose their voice in decisions that directly affect them. The Fauci model — I am the science, therefore criticizing me is anti-science — is precisely the same rhetorical move that UPHE and HEAL Utah deploy on every energy project they oppose. We are the physicians. We are the health experts. Disagreeing with us is disagreeing with science. It is a thought-terminating formula designed not to advance knowledge but to end the conversation. And as the COVID years demonstrated at enormous cost to the country's trust in public health institutions, this kind of arrogance does not protect science. It damages it.
The Same Pattern, Right Here at Home: The Nine Mile Data Center
The Uintah Basin Railway lawsuit was not a one-time event. It reveals a consistent organizational strategy: identify a major development project in Utah, form or join a coalition of like-minded groups, invoke federal environmental law (especially NEPA) as broadly as possible, file lawsuits in favorable federal circuits, and delay or kill the project through litigation — regardless of the actual merits of the completed environmental review.
You do not have to look as far as the Utah State Capitol or a Salt Lake City courtroom to see this pattern repeat. It is happening right now in our own backyard.
Nine Mile Data, LLC — operating under the parent company Energence Utah, LLC — has proposed a large-scale data center complex on approximately 475 acres of a 960-plus-acre parcel located along Wells Draw Road, roughly six miles southwest of Myton, in the South Myton Bench area of Duchesne County. The project represents an estimated $10 billion investment, with 20 to 30 percent expected to be spent locally on labor, services, and construction needs. It would employ up to 1,000 workers at construction peak and 200 full-time employees during long-term operations. The facility has a planned lifespan of at least 50 years.
Let me describe the Wells Draw area for anyone who has not been there, because the opposition certainly has not been honest about it. This is desolate, dry terrain dominated by heavy clay formations that make it difficult for nearly anything to grow. Sagebrush — one of the hardiest plants in the high desert — struggles to take hold on much of this ground. The site sits in the middle of an active oilfield patch, surrounded by existing producing wells that have operated there for years. There is no lush riparian corridor. There are no flowing streams cutting through meadows. It is the kind of terrain that the oilfield has always worked in and that the Basin has always developed responsibly.
This matters because the antagonists opposing the Nine Mile Data Center are not showing you that land. They are circulating photographs of Native American petroglyphs, dense vegetation, and water streams — imagery that evokes a pristine wilderness that does not exist anywhere near the project footprint. It is a deliberate misrepresentation designed to manufacture an emotional response in people who have never set foot in Wells Draw and have no reason to question what they are being shown. Fear over facts, again. Same playbook, different project.
The developer applied for a conditional use permit — exactly the process that county zoning law requires for this type of development in an A-5 Agriculture zone. A public hearing was held on April 2, 2026, at the Duchesne County Centennial Event Center. The process is working exactly as it is supposed to work.
And yet a group of local antagonists has already emerged, amplifying talking points pulled directly from the playbooks of UPHE, HEAL Utah, and their allied organizations — the same groups this article has been documenting. Concerns about water. Concerns about air quality. Concerns about energy consumption. All of them real-sounding. All of them frightening if presented without context. And every single one of them questions that the conditional use permit process, the environmental review, and the standard regulatory approvals are specifically designed to answer.
As a real estate broker and a conservative, I believe in individual property rights without apology. The developer and landowner of the Nine Mile project plan to build this infrastructure on their own ground. They own those parcels. They own the right to develop them within the law. They are not asking for a handout. They are not bypassing the process. They submitted a conditional use permit application and showed up to a public hearing. That is responsible development. That is what following the rules looks like.
Conservatives and Republicans have always stood for two things that are not in conflict: individual property rights and responsible stewardship of the environment. Responsible development with regulatory approvals is not the enemy of the environment. It is the process that protects it. The project is only in its early stages. The questions being raised by opponents — about water use, power generation, traffic, and community impact — will be addressed as the project moves through the required approvals. That is not a dismissal of those questions. That is exactly how the process is designed to work.
What is not responsible is whipping up a community into a state of alarm at a public hearing before the answers to those questions have even been formally sought. UPHE held protests at the Utah State Capitol in April 2026 against data centers, with crowds carrying signs reading "Where's the research" and "People before profits". Here is the answer to that sign: the research is coming. It is part of the process. You cannot demand research and simultaneously try to stop the process that produces it.
The Nine Mile Data Center is an opportunity that a community like ours — 2.5 hours from any major city, fighting for every economic investment — does not get every decade. A $10 billion project spending 20 to 30 percent of its budget locally is the kind of economic development that funds schools, roads, and hospitals for a generation. Our children deserve a reason to stay in the Basin. Facts, not fear, should determine whether they get it.
What Is Actually at Stake
The Uintah Basin is a community that has had to fight for every infrastructure investment, every economic development project, and every connection to the broader state and national economy. We are 2.5 hours from any major city in every direction. Our children face a choice between leaving to find opportunity or staying in a community that has been deliberately kept from growing by outside interests who have never lived here and never will.
The $1.5 billion Uinta Basin Railway would have created construction jobs, permanent operational positions, and unlocked billions of dollars in economic activity for Duchesne, Uintah, and the surrounding counties. The project was backed by the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, the Ute Indian Tribe, and the full weight of the regional community. It survived a 3,600-page federal environmental review and ultimately won a unanimous Supreme Court decision.
And yet it was delayed for years — years of uncertainty, years of lost investment, years of stalled planning — because a group of Salt Lake City-based activists with political agendas and courtroom lawyers decided that their ideology outweighs our community's future.
They say they are for a healthy Utah. But health requires prosperity. Health requires opportunity. Health requires that the children who grow up in the Uintah Basin have a reason to stay. None of that is delivered by a press release or a lawsuit. It is delivered by infrastructure, investment, and the freedom to develop the natural resources that sit beneath this remarkable corner of our state.
The organizations fighting that development are not our doctors. They are not our neighbors. And they are certainly not neutral arbiters of science. They are a special interest group — well-funded, politically connected, and utterly indifferent to the real costs their campaigns impose on the real people of the Uintah Basin.
We have the Supreme Court's 8-0 decision as proof of exactly how far they overreached. And we should not forget it the next time they show up in lab coats to tell us what is best for our community.
