Does the Safe Drinking Water Act authorize EPA to compel UIC permittees to construct monitoring wells on third-party property that permittees lack rights to access without considering the feasibility and costs of such a permit condition?

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 opera tion. 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. § 300h 5) authorize EPA to compel UIC permittees to construct monitoring wells on thirdparty property that permitees lack rights to access without considering the feasibility and costs of such a permit condition?