OPINION: Mixing fracking waste with clean water is a gamble

In a little-known corner of state government lies the Water Quality Control Commission. It’s supposed to protect clean water, but the governor is directing certain members of the commission to approve a plan to allow the state’s biggest polluters to discharge treated fracking waste into New Mexico’s water supply. It’s an enormous gift to the oil and gas industry — and a reckless gamble on technology that doesn’t yet exist.

The governor has twice failed to pass legislation on reuse of fracking wastewater, greenwashed as “produced water,” outside the oilfield. Now, she is trying to push through the commission what she couldn’t get through the Legislature by pressuring commissioners to irresponsibly sacrifice our state’s clean water to Big Oil. Science — not politics — should prevail. We must fight back.

But first, let’s back up. The commission in May voted to adopt a rule proposed by the governor’s own Environment Department to ban the discharge of treated and untreated fracking wastewater — at least until science proves it can be done safely. The commission comprehensively examined the science, with even Big Oil’s witness conceding the technology “isn’t there yet” to discharge to state waters at scale.

Before the ink dried on this rule, industry regrouped as a new organization, the Water, Access, Treatment and Reuse (WATR) Alliance, and filed a petition to replace the discharge ban with an extremely permissive rule. The group claims the science has fundamentally changed. Not so.

But it gets worse. Environment Department Secretary James Kenney directed agency scientists — charged with making sure New Mexico waters are protected — to stand on the sidelines for the new rulemaking after years working successfully to prohibit fracking waste discharge. Never in the commission’s history has the Environment Department failed to appear in a rulemaking for a rule it would implement. This shocking maneuver seeks to bury the department’s thousands of pages of evidence and expert testimony that proved New Mexico cannot safely treat and discharge this fracking waste at scale.

At an Aug. 12 commission meeting, something highly unusual happened: Five cabinet secretaries sat as commissioners — a first in the commission’s 58-year history — displacing experienced agency staff. Emails show the governor’s office orchestrated “WATRgate,” replacing science on the commission with politics. These commissioners all did the governor’s bidding, rejecting motions to stick with the rule that protects clean water. The industry rulemaking will proceed in 2026 at taxpayer expense.

Big Oil is famous for lying to the public. It knew in the 1970s that burning oil and gas causes climate change, mounting a decades-long misinformation campaign to deny its role. Industry knew its operations in the Four Corners created the largest plume of methane — a super-pollutant — nationwide. It denied responsibility until NASA proved otherwise. It knew that deep-well waste injection caused earthquakes and denied that also. This year, Colorado cited its three top oil corporations for falsifying soil and groundwater pollution data thousands of times. Two of those companies are on WATR’s board of directors.

These are the people the governor trusts to safely treat fracking waste for release into our rivers and streams, to apply this waste to our land and irrigation water, and to write the rules on how to do it?

This Trumped-up rulemaking will likely happen next spring. I urge New Mexicans to write the governor, Secretary Kenney and elected officials to oppose the rulemaking moving forward and, if it does, to demand that Environment Department experts be allowed to give their honest opinions. We must show the governor and her Cabinet secretaries that mixing fracking waste with our clean water is a gamble New Mexico cannot afford to lose.