01-05-2025
WildEarth Guardians: Oil and gas spills in New Mexico amount to a 'deluge'
The silhouette of a drill head, backlit by a vibrant sunset, is visible from Route 550 just outside Farmington, N.M., on Oct. 26, 2021. (Photo by Isabel Koyama / Howard Center for Investigative Journalism)
New Mexico oil and gas operators averaged a spill every seven hours in the beginning months of 2025, according to a recent report released by a local environmental group.
Santa Fe-based nonprofit WildEarth Guardians compiled the spill data reported between January and March 2025 by oil and gas operators to the state's Oil Conservation Division, and found 75,000 barrels of liquids had spilled across six counties in the San Juan, Bravo Dome and Permian basins.
The report concludes these spills, mostly from active wells, 'threaten drinking water aquifers, soil health, air quality and the well-being of frontline communities and ecosystems.'
'We want to make sure that the public and policymakers are aware that this is an environmental crisis hiding in plain sight,' Rebecca Sobel, a campaign manager at WildEarth Guardians, told Source. 'These spills are happening as the regular cost of doing business, they're not exceptions — they're the rule for oil and gas operations in New Mexico.'
Of the 75,858 barrels of liquid spilled, operators lost about 10% of the waste into the environment.
'That loss means it's spilled and not recoverable from the environment,' Sobel said. 'That's permanent contamination.'
A spokesperson for the New Mexico Energy Minerals and Natural Resources Department, which oversees the state's Oil Conservation Division, said in a written statement that the department would not comment on specifics in the report.
'We cannot speak to the specifics of the Wild Earth Guardians report,' EMNRD spokesperson Sidney Hill wrote. 'However, the Oil Conservation continues to enforce its rules requiring operators to report and properly remediate all releases on land under its jurisdiction. The OCD also issues violation notices and fines when operators fail to properly remediate a release.'
The report urged state and federal regulators to 'issue meaningful fines, deny permits for repeat violators,' and publicly report the outcomes for violations around spills.
Nearly two thirds of the spills were of produced water — the wastewater from oil and gas fracking — which can contain radioactive materials, cancer-causing or toxic chemicals, heavy metals. Produced water also contains unknown chemicals used in the fracking process which do not have to be disclosed to the public or regulators under trade secrets protections.
'It's hard to do any kind of remediation or cleanup when you don't know what you're cleaning up,' Sobel said.
Additionally, 90 of the spills included crude oil — which contains cancer-causing components such as benzene and metals such as nick, arsenic and mercury. Finally, 28 spills contained condensate, the entrapped liquid hydrocarbon mixtures, and a byproduct of oil and natural gas production, which contains benzene, as well as emissions that can cause health effects.
About half of the spills' causes — 152 — were listed as 'equipment failure,' followed by 66 incidents of 'corrosion' and 29 'human error' spills.
Nearly 90% of the spills happened in the state's southeast corner, split nearly evenly between Eddy and Lea Counties in the Permian basin. Next highest were San Juan and Rio Arriba counties in the San Juan. Finally, one spill each occurred in Harding and Union counties in the Bravo Dome basin.
The majority of spills were listed on federal public lands at 199 spills, followed by 66 incidents on private land and 65 releases on state trust land.
This is the first of quarterly reports WildEarth Guardians expects to release this year.
'Our hope is that by tracking these spills, making them publicly available and accessible, folks start to take them seriously and regulators enact meaningful enforcement and regulation,' Sobel said.
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