WASHINGTON, D.C. – A plan to build a $3 billion hydropower plant in southeastern Oklahoma to generate electricity for Texas was rejected last week – again – by federal regulators.
Tara Zuardo, senior advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, based in Truckee, California, wrote in an email last week that Southeast Oklahoma Power Corporation (SEOPC) “has already been rejected” several times “for failing to meet basic legal requirements.”
For example, SEOPC President Johann (Yau On) Tse sent a letter in January 2024 to Kimberly D. Bose, then-Secretary of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission FERC), advising her of a “notice of intent (NOI) to file an application for an original license and pre-application document (PAD)” for a Pushmataha County Pumped Storage Hydroelectric Project.
Tse, who lives in Dallas, Texas, informed FERC that SEOPC envisions building and operating a 1,200-megawatt hydroelectric power plant along the Kiamichi River, approximately five miles south of Talihina in Pushmataha County. The electricity it would generate would be transmitted via 100 miles of 345-kilovolt overhead power lines installed in two Oklahoma counties and two Texas counties to an Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) substation at Paris, Texas.
On March 21, 2024, FERC rejected SEOPC’s paperwork because of multiple “deficiencies.”
SEOPC submitted a Study Plan on Dec. 23, 2024; FERC rejected it on Jan. 8, 2025.
The SEOPC submitted an updated 164-page Proposed Study Plan to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Feb. 5, 2025.
The FERC staff “preliminarily reviewed” that plan “and find it insufficient to proceed with the study planning process” because it lacks enough information required by commission regulations, Nicholas Jayjack, director of FERC’s Hydropower Licensing Division, wrote in a Feb. 20 letter to Tse.
Before FERC “can make an informed decision on a license application,” the agency “must obtain adequate information on all aspects of the project,” said Celeste Miller, FERC media relations officer.
If SEOPC intends to continue, a second updated study plan must be filed within 30 days, by March 22, Jayjack informed Tse.
Southwest Ledger emailed Tse on Feb. 21, asking, “What are your plans now that FERC has rejected the SEOPC project plans once again?” We received no reply.
Opponents identify plan ‘deficiencies’ In a joint letter to FERC dated Feb. 13, the Kiamichi River Legacy Alliance and the Center for Biological Diversity listed myriad deficiencies in SEOPC’s latest plan.
• All study requests submitted by citizens, government officials, the Choctaw Nation, the Chickasaw Nation, the City of Oklahoma City and the Town of Albion, were “overlooked” in SEOPC’s study plan.
• SEOPC has not incorporated industry- standard hydrological and hydraulic modeling methods.
• SEOPC ignored the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations’ and Oklahoma City’s senior water rights in the Kiamichi River Basin.
Under an agreement struck between the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations and the State of Oklahoma in 2016, Oklahoma City received a permit from the Oklahoma Water Resources Board to withdraw up to 115,000 acre-feet (37.5 billion gallons) of water from the Kiamichi River and Sardis Lake each year. SEOPC’s proposal would take more than 118,000 a-f of water (more than 38 billion gallons) from the river annually.
• SEOPC’s study plan does not recognize the tribes’ water rights under the 2016 Settlement Agreement, and the Texas-based company has failed to consult with the two Native American tribes “despite the project’s location” within their reservations.
• The applicant “failed to analyze groundwater-surface water interactions adequately.
Subterranean groundwater and surface water “are connected, according to all science on the subject,” noted Kenneth Roberts, a Tulsa University professor who is president of the Kiamichi River Legacy Alliance and a landowner along the river.
“With only shallow, minor aquifers in the region, groundwater is recharged with surface waters from streams in the area,” Roberts explained. “By removing water from the recharge source,” groundwater levels would be depleted, “resulting in severe costs of drilling new, deeper water wells.”
• SEOPC’s study encompassed only three monitoring locations, “each providing a single 24-hour measurement.”
• The Kiamichi River has experienced multiple droughts in recent years, such as 2011-12 and again last year. Kiamichi basin supports wildlife The Kiamichi River Basin supports numerous species of wildlife.
For example, the river is inhabited by diverse freshwater mussel populations.
Freshwater species that are members of “an unusually diverse, productive mussel community inhabit the Kiamichi River, which also supports a high diversity of other native aquatic species,” according to Dr. Caryn Vaughn of the University of Oklahoma.
The Kiamichi is home to 30 species of freshwater mussels, which provide important habitat and other services for other river organisms, such as insects and fish, Vaughn wrote in 2006.
The endangered mussels have experienced “extensive reduction in their historical habitat ranges, and for each the Kiamichi is one of relatively few streams that support surviving populations,” Tulsa attorney David Page wrote in a lawsuit petition in support of the Kiamichi River Legacy Alliance in 2019.
Mussel populations in the Kiamichi have declined by 60% over the last 25 years, Page claimed. In the case of the Ouachita rock pocketbook mussel, the Kiamichi “supports the only remaining viable population in the world,” he said.
The river is home to approximately 100 species of fish, according to the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation (ODWC). Sixteen of those fish species are designated in Oklahoma as Species of Greatest Conservation Need,” Jonna Polk, field supervisor with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), wrote in a 2017 letter.
The Kiamichi River is “one of the most species-diverse and unaltered stream systems in Oklahoma,” the ODWC told FERC. “Its middle and upper reaches are relatively pristine and provide important habitat for one of our state’s most unique and valuable fish and wildlife assemblages,” wrote Brandon Brown, Southeast Fisheries and Streams Supervisor for the ODWC.
A study prepared for the Oklahoma Water Resources Center at Oklahoma State University noted that the Kiamichi Basin has “a natural-resource and tourism-driven economy.” Birds, bats, trees
• Southeast Oklahoma has “lots of ‘old growth’ forests that developed over long periods of time, often centuries, without significant disturbance from human activity,” wrote Bernard Paul Corn of Norman.
Those forests “provide critical habitat for many wildlife species, including some that are rare or endangered,” he said, including the red-headed woodpecker, the red-cockaded woodpecker, and the pileated woodpecker.
Three federally listed or proposed species of bats (Indiana bats, Northern long-eared bats, and tricolored bats) “have potential to be in the project area, and additional species have potential for listing within the life of this project,” the USF&WS wrote.
“These bats use trees to roost and raise young (pups),” the agency said. “The construction of reservoirs and transmission lines would require removal of trees over a large area and most of these forested areas would not be restored to trees.”
The SEOPC project would “destroy much of that forest,” Corn lamented. A lot of opponents Letters of protest expressing opposition to SEOPC’s proposed project have been submitted to FERC by literally hundreds of individuals, Oklahoma’s attorney general, at least one congressman from Oklahoma and one from Texas, several Oklahoma towns and counties, and the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations.
“This pointless and hugely destructive reservoir proposal was rejected yet again for very good reasons,” said Zuardo, of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Oklahoma’s residents and wildlife don’t want or need this project. It’s time for the Southeast Oklahoma Power Corporation to take a hint and drop this unnecessary endeavor.”