NEW MEXICO’S OIL AND GAS POLLUTION CRISIS

This piece was published in the Green Fire Times in January 2024.

New Mexico’s Pollution Problem

By Gail Evans and Mario Atencio

Drive through the Greater Chaco landscape of northwestern New Mexico and you may first notice its immensity. Big blue sky over a high desert vista, piñon pines and puffs of sagebrush extending to the horizon and beyond. This is ancient land. Sacred land. 

Once your eyes adjust to the breathtaking beauty, though, you may spot something in the distance that looks like it doesn’t belong. Giant metal barrels, pipes and tanks, camouflaged in hues of green and brown. It’s the first indication that this is also sacrificed land: fracking sites where water, sand and toxic chemicals are blasted deep underground to smash apart rocks and send oil or gas bubbling upward.

And after you’ve recognized one fracking site, you’ll start to see them everywhere. This region is one of the epicenters of New Mexico’s booming oil and gas industry. 

In the past decade, oil production here has increased nearly tenfold, making New Mexico the country’s second largest producer of oil and seventh largest producer of gas. With this surge in production has come a surge in pollution, which most directly hurts the people, animals and ecosystems closest to fracking sites in rural northwestern New Mexico and the Permian Basin.

Each stage of oil and gas extraction emits dangerous air pollution that warms the climate and can cause cancer, respiratory and neurological damage, headaches, nausea and other health harms. It also generates thousands of gallons of toxic liquid waste — health and environmental catastrophes in waiting. 

In February 2019, off a bumpy dirt road about 10 miles from Chaco Canyon, equipment failure at a fracking site caused 59,000 gallons of toxic liquid to gush into a nearby arroyo, flowing over a mile downhill and eventually seeping into the earth and the aquifer below. While this land is remote, it’s not uninhabited. The spill occurred about half a mile from a home, on land where cattle graze. 

The site operator Enduring Resources, which owns about 1,000 oil and gas wells in New Mexico, never compensated nearby residents for contaminating their land and main water source — it never even contacted them about the disastrous spill. 

Enduring also faced no penalty from the state of New Mexico. Tragically that Enduring spill was not an isolated event — far from it. Every day in New Mexico there are an average of four spills of liquid toxic waste at fracking sites, many of which spew millions of gallons of contaminated water into the land and aquifers. In fact, there have been thousands of spills of toxic liquid waste by oil and gas operators in the past few years, and not a single operator has been penalized.

Adding insult to injury, Enduring has received approval from New Mexico’s Oil Conservation Division to convert a water well in the same area into a toxic liquid waste injection well, where up to 20,000 barrels per day of its toxic waste will be injected 7,000 feet below ground at high pressure, raising community concerns about groundwater contamination and earthquakes. Again, the community and landowners in the area received no notice and had no opportunity to voice their concerns before the state approved this massive, dangerous project. 

These are just two examples of how our state has failed to put in place a statutory, regulatory and enforcement system to protect our people and environment. Instead New Mexico has given the oil and gas industry a free pass to make billons at the people’s expense — and the expense of our wildlife and water and air. 

So on May 10, 2023, frontline community members, Indigenous people, youth, and environmental organizations filed a landmark lawsuit against New Mexico for violating article XX, section 21 of its state constitution. This pollution control clause declares that the “protection of the state's beautiful and healthful environment is...of fundamental importance to the public interest, health, safety and the general welfare. The legislature shall provide for control of pollution and control of despoilment of the air, water and other natural resources of this state, consistent with the use and development of these resources for the maximum benefit of the people.” 

Despite this constitutional duty, the state continues to authorize and promote unchecked oil and gas extraction. 

While New Mexico does have environmental laws and regulations on air and water quality, it has exempted the mega-polluting oil and gas industry from most of those laws. And it fails to enforce the few oil and gas pollution control measures that are in place, citing a lack of resources and leaving our air, lands and waters poisoned.

This addiction to the extraction of fossil fuels leads to premature death, food insecurity, and widespread damage to property, the climate, ecosystems, and Indigenous resources and holy sites like Greater Chaco.

Our lawsuit will be the first time the constitution’s pollution control clause is tested in court. 

We’re asking the state to stop permitting new oil and gas wells until it complies with its constitutional duty to control pollution at the more than 69,000 active wells. We’re also seeking a strong statutory, regulatory and enforcement structure that guarantees oil and gas companies meet standards to keep New Mexicans and our environment safe. 

For starters, the state should put a health buffer zone of at least a mile between dangerous oil and gas drilling and places frequented by people — where we live, work, play, get healthcare and go to school. Instead of abandoning wells when they stop producing, companies should have to clean them up and ensure they no longer emit methane or other pollutants that make us sick. Instead of using our precious and scarce fresh water, oil companies should be required to reuse their toxic wastewater. And instead of continuing to sell out our state to the climate-killing fossil fuel industry, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham should be leading us toward a just, renewable energy transition. 

We believe that our state’s beautiful landscapes and precious resources belong to New Mexicans, not oil and gas companies. It’s time to start protecting them and putting public health before private profits, both for us and for those who come after. 

Gail Evans is a New Mexico-based attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity.

Mario Atencio is a citizen of the Navajo Nation and a plaintiff in Atencio v. State of New Mexico.