New Mexico has sold out to the O&G industry

An op-ed by members of NMLAWS published in the Albuquerque Journal on October 15, 2023. By Gail Evans / Center for Biological Diversity and Daniel Tso / Navajo Nation citizen

Among New Mexico’s many natural resources, perhaps the most precious — and valuable — is one we can’t see.

Deep in the earth below us lie aquifers of fossilized fresh water, which seeped through crevices and cracks in soil, rocks and sand tens of thousands of years ago when woolly mammoths roamed this land.

Amid a rapidly changing climate, these groundwater aquifers are like a savings account for when our rivers run dry. But this savings account is under threat from our state’s fracking frenzy.

Over the past decade, oil production in New Mexico has increased nearly tenfold. And as highlighted recently by the New York Times, “to strike oil in America, you need water. Plenty of it.”

Increasingly oil and gas companies have been using a process called horizontal fracking. This involves drilling deep down into the surface of the earth, then across horizontally for thousands of feet, and injecting vast quantities of sand, chemicals and of course water to break open bedrock and force fossil fuels — as well as contaminated water — to the surface.

Using this process, the industry has become a mega water user, with single wells consuming millions of gallons.

The irony of course is that this same oil and gas industry is already holding the world’s climate hostage. And as the relentless promotion and use of fossil fuels continues, the climate catastrophe worsens, which strains our rivers and makes water resources even scarcer.

Here in New Mexico, we’re already experiencing the dire consequences of human-caused climate change.

Yet in New Mexico, companies in the oil and gas sector are unencumbered by regulations that limit water use or prevent contamination. We’ve handed them virtually unlimited access to our savings account.

Meanwhile, families who live near oil and gas wells, which are concentrated in rural communities of the Permian Basin and Navajo lands around Chaco Canyon, are breathing toxic pollution. Their wells are running dry or are being contaminated by oil spills. Others are forced to haul water because the cost of drilling wells is prohibitive, even as oil and gas companies lap up the ancient water under their homes for maximum profit.

That’s why Indigenous peoples, youth, frontline community members and environmental groups filed a landmark lawsuit in May. We’re suing New Mexico and state officials for violating their state constitutional duty to control oil industry pollution and protect our water resources.

Our state has some of the strongest constitutional protections for the environment anywhere in the country. In 1971, New Mexicans voted to amend our state Constitution to guarantee a beautiful and healthful environment and to require the Legislature to control pollution and prevent the despoilment of our air, water and other natural resources.

Despite these constitutional safeguards, the oil industry runs virtually unchecked in New Mexico.

In the past few years, bills have been proposed to prohibit the use of freshwater resources in drilling, to allow consideration of an operator’s criminal record before granting a permit to drill, to create health buffer zones for people living and working near oil and gas operations, to require consideration of environmental harm before implementing new policies, to ban fracking, and to ban the re-use of toxic liquid waste off the oil field.

None passed. None even moved beyond committee hearings.

In its quest for oil and gas revenues, New Mexico has surrendered entirely to the industry, allowing it to squander our precious fresh water, poison our air and tarnish the ancestral landscapes of Indigenous people.

We are caretakers of this land and of the ancient fresh water far below our feet. The time has come to start treating these precious natural resources as what they are: the inheritance of future generations of New Mexicans.

Gail Evans is a New Mexico-based attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. Daniel Tso is a citizen of the Navajo Nation and a former Navajo Nation Council delegate.