This year, the New Mexico Water Quality Control Commission held a hearing in Santa Fe to seek public input on regulating wastewater discharge from the oil and gas industry. It ended up dealing a blow to Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s ambitious proposal to reuse the water for alternative energy development.
Under the proposal, which was announced a few months earlier at the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference and dubbed the “Strategic Water Supply,” the state would buy both natural brackish and oilfield-produced water, contract with private companies for treatment or cleaning, and then provide the cleaned water to so-called green industries like solar and wind energy and electric vehicle manufacturing. The $500 million investment, Lujan Grisham said at the U.N. conference, would help “strengthen our climate resiliency and protect our precious freshwater resources.”
But the majority of the public who attended the hearing or submitted written comments opposed any discharge of either treated or untreated produced water, with some calling the water toxic a... Read more
