Your help needed to protect methane reductions

By Camilla Feibelman, Rio Grande Chapter director

You’ve read it here more than once. Oil and gas operations throughout the state are wasting natural gas they extract from our public lands.

Methane — the key component of natural gas that also happens to be a powerful greenhouse gas — is leaked, vented or flared throughout the oil and gas drilling, transport and storage processes. As part of the Paris Climate Agreement, the Obama Administration passed rules at the EPA and BLM that would slow this waste, protect health, reduce climate change and brought more royalties into the state treasury.

That these methane rules (against all odds) are still in effect is thanks to you. The Trump Administration has done its ...

NM utility to add local jobs, 1,200 megawatts of wind
Some good news for 2018: The Coalition for Clean, Affordable Energy and other intervenors in December reached agreement with Southwestern Public Service supporting approval of a massive wind project that will bring at least $57 million in spending to New Mexico contractors, vendors and workers ...
Greater Chaco Employs “Warning” Signs to Combat Fracking
Ignored by the Bureau of Land Management, which continues to auction off their community to fracking, community members in the Greater Chaco region are taking a stand against unchecked drilling and oil and gas leasing near their homes by planting signs along U.S. 550 in Counselor, N.M. The messages read: Entering Energy Sacrifice Zone, We Are Greater Chaco, Violence Against Land is Violence Against Us, Extraction Threatens Our Health and Safety, Selloff Of Sacred Lands Dooda, and Methane Gas: Odorless Toxic in Our Air ...
#ItsNotOver -- Greater Chaco advocates descend on BLM

Celebrating Lease-sale deferral, pressing for permanent protections and planning

For Immediate Release: Wednesday, March 7, 2018

Santa Fe — Dozens of Greater Chaco advocates rallied in front of the Bureau of Land Management state office in Santa Fe Wednesday to claim victory over last week’s announcement that land slated for auction near Chaco Culture National Historical Park would be deferred until further action. Impacted community members delivered resolutions from Navajo Nation Chapters and Pueblos and more than 200,000 public comments pressing for a moratorium on fracking in the region, for environmental and public-health protections, and for meaningful consultation and consent from tribes.

“We are thankful that Senators Udall and Heinrich and Representatives Michelle Lujan-Grisham and Ben Ray Lujan stood up for ...

Greater Chaco spared from fracking auction
On Thursday, March 2, the Interior Department announced the cancellation of an oil and gas lease sale near Chaco Culture National Historical Park, a UNESCO Heritage Site in northern New Mexico. The leases would have auctioned off an additional 4,434 acres in the Greater Chaco region for industrialized fracking, exposing local communities to increased pollution and threatening ancient ruins considered sacred by Indigenous Nations ...
Fracking Threats to the Albuquerque Basin Aquifer
Geologist Donald Phillips helped turn the tide on the outcome of the Sandoval County Commission vote to approve the Stoddard/Heil oil and gas ordinance. Donald Phillips’ presentation summarizes the general geology of Sandoval County and the risks of contaminating drinking-water aquifers from horizontal drilling and fracking ...
On February 12, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released a proposal to gut a key safeguard that would limit methane pollution from oil and gas drilling operations. The proposal effectively eliminates a standard put forth by the Obama administration requiring oil and gas companies operating on public lands to limit methane pollution ...
Health Impact Reports from Oil & Gas Well Exposure
The Navajo Nation Health Impact Report Summary on Oil & Gas Well Exposure is an environmental epidemiological report of how oil and gas development impacts the health of those living in the neighborhood.   ...