Farmington residents urge increased attention, oversight of oil and gas wells in San Juan Basin

Part four of a four-part series on abandoned oil and gas wells in New Mexico.

SAN JUAN BASIN — “This landscape is like china. Once you break that china plate, you can’t put it back together.”

That’s what Don Schreiber said as he gazed at a brittle landscape he said was once a highly productive agricultural area.

A rancher and retired business owner, he was navigating his truck along a bumpy dirt road in northwestern New Mexico. The path only connects to oil and gas wells; operators scraped it out to access the resources.

He drove around what’s known as the Horseshoe Gallup oil field, populated with hundreds of wells. The San Juan area doesn’t currently have the same oil-producing fame as the Permian Basin, and Schreiber wants to bring attention to harm happening in the northwest corner of the state from a legacy of abandoned wells.

The San Juan Basin is one of the oldest producing areas in the nation.

“It’s kind of remarkable that the San Juan Basin has lost some of its notoriety only because the Permian is worse,” Schreiber said. “You know, we’re the methane hotspot. We’re the original one. Yet there’s stuff that is worse than us.”

Humans are still here because they can adapt to anything, he said, but humans should not adapt to the destruction of a natural wonder like the San Juan Basin.

“I’m not proud that the county that I grew up in is a world contributor to global warming,” Schreiber said, who is 75. “I mean, that’s a legacy for the San Juan Basin. That’s not what I want my grandkids to think about.”

He wants to see the land cleaned up but doesn’t believe it’ll ever be what it once was .

“You can never recover from drilling a well, not in the western United States,” he said.

Schreiber said it’s hard to describe what’s been lost on the backside of the Mesa Verde National Monument. The San Juan Basin also produces more gas than oil, especially compared to the Permian Basin’s oil resources, so spills or environmental damage may not be as obvious as are black puddles on the ground. He said he believes a lot of the beautiful landscape, formerly full of natural shrubbery, lost life to contamination through oil and gas extraction.

“It’s impossible to get a picture that conveys what we’re losing here,” Schreiber said.

An unrelenting sun beamed overhead as Schreiber pulled his truck over. Fellow Farmington resident and solar co-op consultant David Fosdeck broke the landscape’s silence as the two walked over to an abandoned oil site.

Massive tank batteries loomed over the space, staircases leading up the tanks showing the rust of a site that hasn’t been used in years. A battered old truck sat nearby, which Fosdeck said was probably used to transport product from smaller sites to store here.

Tags on the site indicated the Chuza Oil Co. was responsible for this site and, a state database shows at least 28 of the company’s wells in New Mexico.

Fosdeck pointed to a fiberglass tank where liquids like oil or produced water were once regularly stored. The tank had visible dark, oily stains all around it, indicating potential contamination that acts as a threat to the soil and potentially groundwater.

“Any responsible oil and gas operator would not be allowed to have these things like this,” Fosdeck said.

An intricate network of well piping was set up nearby, and Schreiber leaned in to a soft, hissing noise coming out of the piping. That, he said, is a methane leak — something the environmental advocacy organization Earthworks also has verified.

Leaning in closer to put his ear against the piping, Schreiber listened to the rush and gurgling of water flowing inside the infrastructure.

“The wells still create pressure, the natural formation pressure, and it pushes that water through whatever kind of crazy system there is,” he said. “That’s the downhole formation pressures pushing that water, mixing it with the oil, contaminating it with who knows what. That has never changed since the day we set foot out here three years ago.”

Before destroyed lands get restored, Schreiber said, the wells need to be plugged, including the ones that were plugged incorrectly in the past. It will take decades to get the job done, he said.

He said if enough wells are plugged, the pressure into underground water formations will stop and let the water table recharge.

Who was there first?

Northwestern New Mexico is described as a checkerboard.

The land is made up of private, tribal, state and federal jurisdictions. The Horseshoe Gallup Field is surrounded by culturally significant landmarks to Indigenous communities like the Navajo Nation and the Southern Ute Indian Tribe.

Robyn Jackson is the executive director of Diné CARE, an environmental justice organization. Jackson (Navajo) said the oil and gas industry has made it difficult for people to live in the San Juan area, with its the negative impacts on the air and water.

“They owe our communities after all these years of impact,” she said, “and they should not be allowed to evade their responsibilities around cleanup.”

She said the booming oil development in the Permian causes the necessary cleanup of the San Juan Basin wells to get overlooked.

“I think that unfortunately, the leaseholders, operators think that no one cares and there’s less incentive for them to be accountable for cleanup,” she said.

But if companies have impacted natural resources, Jackson continued, they need to clean up after themselves.

She’s worried that’s not often happening on tribal lands, especially.

“Unfortunately, I think that too many people disregard tribal lands, thinking that there’s a lot of cleanup that doesn’t have to be done because it tends to be out of sight,” she said.

Schreiber said Jackson helped him question his preconceptions and see the white colonialism aspects that come with extractivism. He said San Juan County still retains old perspectives about racism, climate denial and environmental irresponsibility.

“It’s significant that this was an Indian, Native community first,” Schreiber said.

Jackson said jurisdictional issues can also lead to cleanup delays in the northwestern part of the state. She said the federal government needs to better lay down enforcement rules.

“There needs to be more proactive and initiation efforts on the part of these oversight agencies, enforcement agencies,” she said, “and I think a willingness to come together to work with the different communities that cover these different jurisdictions.”

The U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs didn’t respond to an inquiry from the Journal on the concerns that jurisdictional issues are slowing cleanup progress, particularly on tribal lands.

‘A long road’

Schreiber said nothing coming out of the abandoned wells is good for them or other people, but “if you’re a Mom and Pop oil and gas fighter like we are,” there’s no time for thinking about potential health issues they could be facing. He said they want to fight it out.

It’s part of an effort to stand up to an industry that dominates the state he lives in, he said, and acknowledge a long-standing issue.

“Oil and gas dominates every part of New Mexico — the judiciary, the legislative, the regulatory, the media — because they are the richest industry in the history of the world,” Schreiber said.

Progress in cleanup is happening, especially under Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s administration, he said, but slowly.

“We’ve got 100 years of domination by this industry in this state,” Schreiber said. “So what we can say is, under the Lujan Grisham administration, they are taking steps to turn that around, taking steps to mitigate that influence. But it’s going to be a long road.”

Four-part oil and gas series

Photos from the abandoned oil and gas wells in New Mexico series