I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
State oil and gas regulators are spread too thin to do their jobs effectively, concludes an investigative piece by ProPublica that compares the degree to which drilling has increased in 22 states with staffing levels at the state agencies charged with overseeing the drilling. Data in the report, from the Bureau of Land Management and World Oil, shows an aggregate increase in number of wells drilled in New Mexico since 2003, but a decline in the rate in which wells are drilled each year.
ProPublica developed a database of state specific data that compares increases in number of wells since 2004 with increases in number of state regulators. Unfortunately, obtaining numbers for New Mexico from the Oil Conservation Division on enforcement or number of wells in the state proved difficult for ProPublica.
From the story:
New Mexico’s Oil Conservation Division declined to provide data on its enforcement staff numbers, and said it does not track historical enforcement actions in a consistent manner, and would not release any of that information. The OCD also did not make total wells information available. Information listed here is from World Oil’s annual count of oil and gas producing wells. The information listed from the BLM was provided by the regional bureau.
The number of oil and gas wells being drilled each year in the 22 states has jumped by 45 percent since 2004, but states haven’t kept the same pace in hiring regulators, which “…strikes strikes at the heart of the industry’s long-standing argument that state regulatory agencies will be more effective industry watchdogs than the federal government.”
Gas drilling poses potential problems for environmental quality because it relies on hydraulic fracturing, ProPublica states, which is a process that injects millions of gallons of chemically infused water underground and produces large volumes of waste. The oil and gas industry has fended off efforts to more strictly regulate drilling by claiming that state oversight is sufficient, but the question of whether or not there are enough regulators is rarely brought up, the piece states.
ProPublica turned to New Mexico’s own outgoing State Natural Resources Trustee Jim Baca for insight into why regulators are important:
“Not having eyeballs on the ground is horrendous,” said Jim Baca, who served during the Clinton administration as director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that oversees more than 85,000 oil and gas wells on federal land. “If you don’t enforce the law, the industry will do whatever they think they can get away with.”
