Supreme Court of the United States · Official docket →
Panoche Energy Center, LLC v. Environmental Protection Agency, et al.
Paid petition · United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, No. 23-1268 · judgment June 18, 2024
Before the decision, well below the 4.1% base rate, with no standout signals pointing toward a grant.
Question presented
Petitioner Panoche Energy Center, LLC (“Panoche”) manages a power plant that is critical to California’s electrical grid. Panoche holds an underground injection control (“UIC”) permit from the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA” or the “Agency”) that authorizes it to dispose of nonhazardous water used for cooling its plant by injecting it thousands of feet below the Earth’s surface. The permit is essential to the plant’s operation. Panoche has always complied with the permit’s terms, and its injections have never endangered local drinking water. But when the permit came up for renewal, EPA abruptly imposed a condition requiring Panoche to install a new 3,500- foot-deep monitoring well over a mile away at a private commercial orchard that Panoche does not own and has no right to access. EPA acknowledged it was compelling Panoche to acquire new property rights from a landowner who had no obligation to sell them. (The landowner has since refused to allow the well to be drilled at all, for any price.) But EPA claimed Congress empowered it to impose this unprecedented—and it turns out, impossible—permit condition through a provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act that does not even mention permittees having to drill monitoring wells anywhere. The Question Presented is: Does the Safe Drinking Water Act (42 U.S.C. § 300h5) authorize EPA to compel UIC permittees to construct monitoring wells on third-party property that permitees lack rights to access without considering the feasibility and costs of such a permit condition? (i)
Counsel of record
For petitioner
Varudhini Chilakamarri
K&L Gates LLP
For respondent
D. John Sauer
Solicitor General
Proceedings
- May 12 2025Letter from the Solicitor General consenting to the dismissal of the petition pursuant to Rule 46 filed.
- May 12 2025Petition Dismissed - Rule 46.
- May 05 2025Motion of petitioner to dismiss the petition pursuant to Rule 46 filed.
- Apr 10 2025Motion to extend the time to file a response is granted and the time is further extended to and including May 12, 2025.
- Apr 08 2025Motion to extend the time to file a response from April 11, 2025 to May 12, 2025, submitted to The Clerk.
- Mar 10 2025Motion to extend the time to file a response is granted and the time is further extended to and including April 11, 2025.
- Mar 07 2025Motion to extend the time to file a response from March 12, 2025 to April 11, 2025, submitted to The Clerk.
- Feb 06 2025Motion to extend the time to file a response is granted and the time is extended to and including March 12, 2025.
- Feb 05 2025Motion to extend the time to file a response from February 10, 2025 to March 12, 2025, submitted to The Clerk.
- Jan 03 2025Petition for a writ of certiorari filed. (Response due February 10, 2025)
- Dec 02 2024Application (24A433) granted by Justice Kagan extending the time to file until January 5, 2025.
- Nov 26 2024Application (24A433) to extend further the time from December 6, 2024 to January 5, 2025, submitted to Justice Kagan.
- Oct 31 2024Application (24A433) granted by Justice Kagan extending the time to file until December 6, 2024.
- Oct 25 2024Application (24A433) to extend the time to file a petition for a writ of certiorari from November 6, 2024 to December 6, 2024, submitted to Justice Kagan.