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.
Rules requiring environmental protections for oil and gas pits are not responsible for the drop in New Mexico’s revenues from the oil and gas industry, Joanna Prukop, former New Mexico Secretary of the Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, wrote in an Albuquerque Journal op-ed yesterday.What does an oil and gas pit look like? Prukop described it like this:
Visualize the coffee grounds in your coffee maker; add some grease, mud, oil, salt water and numerous hazardous chemicals until your concoction fills a container the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Now, bury it on someone else’s property and leave it.
In 2008, the New Mexico Oil Conservation Commission passed a rule, commonly referred to as “the pit rule”, that says pits have to have liners to prevent the leaching of the toxic mix Prukop described. It also lays out other regulations about how a pit is to be properly closed.
There are at least 421 cases of known ground water contamination caused by drilling pits; most were self-reported by industry. It is unknown how many other cases there are because, until the Pit Rule was implemented, most pits were buried in place and no testing was required.
If the Pit Rule were not in place, she says, the burden of cleaning up contaminated land would be on the public rather than the companies who drilled the wells in the first place. Prukop’s piece addresses the claim made by some that the pit rule is driving the oil and gas industry out of the state, and therefore responsible for the state’s drop in revenues. The oil and gas industry’s own data show that the its the price of oil and natural gas that determine the level of production, and that the dip in New Mexico’s production due to a collapse in prices has been similar to other western states, particularly Wyoming.
