New Mexico Lawmakers to Decide Whether Oil and Gas Wastewater Could Be Reused on Wide Scale

Inside Climate News • By Carrie Klein

If new rules are approved, treated “produced water” could be used for agriculture, growing trees and manufacturing.

In New Mexico—one of the largest producers of oil and gas in the country—researchers are trying to grow hemp, sunflowers and trees with purified fracking wastewater. For now, using such “produced water” for anything in the open environment is prohibited in the state. 

Each experiment will be completely enclosed, so that no water leaks out to potentially contaminate surrounding areas with toxins, salt and oil residue. 

Extracting oil and gas requires swimming pools-worth of water—on average between 1 and 9 million gallons for a single well. Even more water comes out of the earth in the process. In total, around one trillion gallons of produced water are created across the country each year. 

“Historically, that produced water is considered a waste product,” said Mike Dyson, chief executive officer at Infinity Water Solutions. 

Oil producers are left to figure out what to do with it. “There’s really too much water that’s produced to be able to dispose of it all on site,” said Sydney Lienemann, deputy secretary of administration at the New Mexico Environment Department.

 In New Mexico’s case, produced water is often trucked to neighboring Texas, where it’s disposed of underground with injection wells, a practice that’s been linked to earthquakes and can also end up polluting groundwater. 

Some produced water is cleaned up and re-used to extract more oil and gas. For years, Infinity has been treating produced water to do just that. But as New Mexico has faced growing concerns about water shortages and drought, state leaders are looking at how to use produced water for other applications beyond the oilfield. 

Having enough clean water in the coming decades is a major concern for the state. In the next 50 years, the state will lose 25 percent of its groundwater and surface water due to climate change, Leinemann said. 

For that reason, Gov. Michelle Grisham introduced the Strategic Water Supply, a program that recommends tapping into some of the nearly two billion barrels of produced water generated each year in New Mexico that can’t be reused in the oilfield. The plan aims to unlock 100,000 acre-feet of new water for clean energy production, storage and manufacturing by 2028 and develop regulatory frameworks for reusing that water by 2026. Grisham introduced her plan to the legislature in 2023, but it failed to pass. 

This January, the legislature will vote on it again, along with a new rule that will decide whether treated produced water can be used for industrial processes, manufacturing and agriculture. Depending on what lawmakers decide, billions of barrels of water that have been considered waste could turn into a new clean resource. 

But before then, there are plenty of questions to answer and concerns to assuage. “This waste can be toxic. It could be radioactive, it could be dangerous in other ways,” said Amy Mall, director of fossil fuels at the National Resource Defense Council. Still, “if it was subject to safer standards, the idea of reducing water usage is a positive.” 

Read the full article at Inside Climate News here.