The recent outcry against the idea of bolstering drought-stricken New Mexico’s diminishing water supply by treating and reusing toxic water from oil and gas production to grow food, support cities, spur industry and maintain wetlands has refocused attention on our state’s most important and least discussed environmental issue — the public health implications of our polluted water.
This issue comes at a particularly poignant moment when the world health establishment is finally beginning to acknowledge the dangers of pollution, especially to children. Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) account for 3/4 of all deaths globally. The Lancet, a British medical journal with a focus on “planetary health,” estimates that environmental pollution “is a leading NCD risk factor globally,” and is “responsible for an estimated 16% of all NCD mortality.”
Even more disturbing is the World Health Organization’s (WHO) estimate that one-third of all childhood deaths are caused by environmental pollution.
So when environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Amigos Bravos urge state government to abandon plans to re-use “produced” waste water from fracking and other petroleum extraction processes they are not being alarmist. This is particularly so in a state like ours with so much dirty groundwater from the military industrial complex, mining and pumping, and our modern way of life.
Pediatrician researchers like Philip and Mary Landrigan in their book, “Children and Environmental Toxins,” estimate that more than 80,000 new chemicals have been released into the environment since the 1980s and that at the same time rates of childhood disease like autism, ADHD, asthma, certain cancers, developmental disorders and birth defects have “skyrocketed.”
So called “produced water” from petroleum extraction “typically contains many known toxic substances harmful to human health such as arsenic, radium, mercury, and benzene as well as unknown toxic pollutants from chemical additives injected into wells to facilitate extraction,” according to Amigos Bravos.
New Mexico state government is proposing a new produced water “rule” that would prohibit dumping untreated waste water into groundwater and surface waters around the state. That’s certainly a sound idea. The trouble is that the rule as it stands also leaves open the possibility of using “treated” produced water in agriculture and especially “food crop” farming. It also would allow the reuse of produced water in “industrial projects,” which could “carry increased risk of contamination of ground and surface water through spills, accidents, and inadvertent discharges to public wastewater systems,” Amigos Bravos warns.
According to the AP, the oil and gas industry generates four to five barrels of waste water to every barrel of oil produced. In 2023, New Mexico produced 667.5 million barrels of oil. That would add up to a whole lot of toxic water being moved around the state. It would in effect delocalize produced water pollution and put it everywhere in New Mexico.
It’s true that agriculture in California’s Central Valley, one of the great food producing regions in our country and the world, uses treated and diluted produced water on many of its fields. The California food industry maintains that such water is 99% clean. Sounds too good to be true and not quite good enough to be useful.
Cleaning up contaminated water is notoriously difficult and expensive. It’s such a problem that even the recently announced $60 million to be spent by the Department of Interior on “drought resiliency” projects in southern New Mexico apparently hasn’t budgeted a cent for the clean up of toxic water.
Water “remediation” uses many techniques, designed by many companies all using proprietary gobbledygook to obscure their methods, which include such things as “air sparging,” “biosparging,” “ion exchange,” “bioventing” and using microorganisms to eat waste, techniques often described by a landslide of acronyms and euphemisms beyond anyone’s comprehension. And everything, of course, costs a fortune, including the most expensive and perhaps most effective processes of all, the modified reverse osmosis techniques normally used in desalination.
Water remediation is a long way from being a refined science or a politically accepted expenditure. With emerging major public health concerns over toxic water and the well-being of children, now is not the time to spread even treated toxic waste water from oil and gas extraction across the state. Instead, require the oil and gas industry to clean up its own toxic water and make it drinkable. New Mexicans really don’t need to spend their tax dollars to clean up the hazardous mess left by fossil fuel millionaires in pursuit of ever-increasing profits.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Another important column, V.B. This is indeed alarming. Here’s to our being able to put sufficient pressure on the producers of this dangerous waste to do their own cleaning up. I’m not optimistic. If we could organize boycotts that hit them where it hurts, maybe… But no one seems willing to make the sacrifices that would require. As with all aspects of predatory capitalism, immediate profit is all that matters. When will they have the foresight to understand that if they kill off future generations there will be no one left to buy their products?
VB, thank you for your excellent column. Just say NO! This is a bad idea. Oil and Gas must be held responsible for the pollution they have created. Our working families shouldn’t pay the tab. Ray Powell
Thank you for this information, VB. And thanks to Ray Powell and Margaret Randall for their responses.
Hope we can just say NO. Water is so precious and the development continues in oil and gas, industry, military and commercial/residential.