BY BRIAN SWEENEY, COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR
WESTERN ENVIRONMENTAL LAW CENTER
FEATURED IMAGE BY GREG LEWIS
Over the course of the last year and a half, the Sierra Club Rio Grande Chapter and Amigos Bravos, represented by the Western Environmental Law Center’s Tannis Fox, took part in a critical rulemaking for New Mexico’s clean water supply. A Water Quality Control Commission proceeding addressed whether to prohibit the discharge of “produced water” – a toxic byproduct of oil and gas drilling – from being discharged into New Mexico’s ground and surface waters.
The New Mexico Environment Department initiated the rulemaking to ban discharges of this toxic soup. The risks of discharging fracking wastewater to our waterways are many. It contains chemicals harmful to humans and the environment. There is no known treatment to remove those chemicals at scale. The oil and gas industry is not required to disclose what chemicals are in it; and there are no water quality standards for many of these toxic chemicals to protect human health and the environment.
“Produced water” is the water and chemicals that go down the well when drilling and the water and chemicals that come with the oil or gas that is extracted. Produced water contains many known and unknown pollutants. Many are known hazards. For example, produced water commonly contains arsenic, barium, bromide, mercury, benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylenes.
At the hearing, Sierra Club and Amigos Bravos put on compelling expert testimony in favor of a discharge prohibition, supporting the position of Environmental Department experts. The New Mexico Oil and Gas Association argued treated produced water could be discharged safely into our precious waterways, but their experts’ testimony was vague and unconvincing.
The hearing nearly veered off course when, in the second-to-last meeting, the Commission voted to allow “pilot projects” to discharge up to 84,000 gallons of this toxic wastewater per day into New Mexico’s groundwater. Our team shot into action and filed a motion to reconsider challenging the evidentiary basis of the commission’s decision.
At the next meeting, after considering our request to reconsider, the commission adopted a final rule banning the discharge of toxic oil and gas wastewater to surface and ground waters. The rule will sunset in five years to assess whether viable treatment technologies have been developed.
This nation-leading rule sets a strong, defensible position that keeps New Mexicans and our environment safe from this fracking waste, and we will vigilantly advocate for the strongest defensible protections again when the state revisits the rule.
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