As New Mexico shakes, state cancels dozens of planned wastewater injection sites

Fencing, barbed wire and warning signs surround a wastewater injection well owned by Occidental Permian, Ltd. and situated next to Jefferson Elementary School and Bensing Park in Hobbs, New Mexico. More than 8.7 million barrels of wastewater have been injected in the well in the past decade according to data from the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division.. (Photo by Jerry Redfern / Capital & Main)

Guzzler.’ ‘Bottomless Pit.’ ‘Deep Thirst.’ ‘Big Swig.’

More like: ‘No Dice.’

The thirsty well names reflected the hopes of companies to fill them with oilfield wastewater, a problematic and toxic byproduct of the oil trade. But a series of earthquakes in the Permian Basin of New Mexico has prompted the state’s Oil Conservation Division to cancel these four and 71 other waste injection wells planned along the state’s southern border with Texas.

In addition, recent research by the state’s seismology lab has uncovered thousands of previously uncatalogued quakes in the area, further clarifying the link between wastewater injection and seismic activity. Meanwhile, a state agency’s plans to allow that wastewater to be used outside the oilfield took a beating.

The canceled wells were planned in the County Line Seismic Response Area, covering roughly 500 square miles of some of the most lucrative acreage in the Permian Basin, the country’s most productive oil basin. Earlier quakes in the area led to the creation of the zone and the state’s Seismicity Response Protocol in late 2021 that laid out how and when to reduce or halt wastewater injections following local temblors.

Up to 2.3 million barrels of so-called produced water a day would have been injected into the now-canceled wells. That water is oilfield waste, pumped from wells along with the oil and natural gas. In New Mexico, on average, about four barrels of the wastewater are produced for each barrel of oil extracted. The water is extremely briney, laced with hydrocarbons, often spiked with drilling chemicals and regularly contains radioactive isotopes.

And nobody really wants the stuff.

While some companies do use produced water to drill new wells, most pay to have it hauled away and pumped it into underground formations. These formations are not empty rooms just waiting to be filled with brine: They are porous rock. Injecting produced water increases the pressure in that rock and, in turn, in the surrounding formations. That often leads to earthquakes as the rocks shift under the pressure.

Urbi Basu studies these induced quakes from her new perch as the manager of the Seismological Observatory at the New Mexico Bureau of Geology. She initially arrived from India to study induced seismology in the Permian Basin for her postdoctoral work at New Mexico Tech. There, she tested a trio of machine learning tools to find which worked best in Permian Basin geology, using old seismological data to uncover previously undetected quakes.

Basu said she found thousands of such quakes — small ones — as the ground beneath the Permian Basin shifted from all of the injected water. “No one can feel those earthquakes,” she said, but they are important. Generally, seismologists scan seismic data looking for spikes in readings that signal a possible quake, then line up those spikes with data from other recording stations to pinpoint a quake’s epicenter and calculate its intensity.

But it’s difficult for humans to differentiate the signal of tiny quakes in seismic data from the human-caused noise of rumbling trucks, machinery and underground explosions from hydraulic fracturing. However, a computer can recognize the minute structures in a tiny quake’s signal that distinguish it from technological background noise. “Manually we will always have some human error,” Basu said, “but the machine learning does not miss out on those things.

“The most likely causes of earthquakes in that area is injection activities,” she said. “So if there was no injection activities, even the smaller earthquakes wouldn’t be happening.”

The research has real-world implications, helping state agencies and oil companies find and avoid previously unknown faults. “That really helps in finally choosing well locations,” Basu said, “because no one really wants to drill at a known fault.”

Knowing the location and number of small quakes helps geologists track swarms of little quakes that can be a harbinger of larger quakes to come. That knowledge also alerts New Mexico’s Oil Conservation Division to shut down injection wells — or stop them from being drilled in the first place, as happened earlier this year.

Gerasimos Razatos, acting director of the Oil Conservation Division, said, “The previous frequency and intensity of earthquakes in this area required the [Seismic Response Area] to be created.” And once they started regulating injections, seismic activity declined in the seismic response area.

Another reason for Basu’s work is to track injections and resulting quakes, since the quakes can show up miles from the problematic injection well. “Earthquakes might be happening 70 or 50 miles away,” Basu said, “and in other places they might be happening very close to the injection area.”

Oil isn’t the only thing under the ground in New Mexico’s Permian Basin. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the nation’s only permanent repository for high-level radioactive waste from the nuclear weapons industry, sits 2,150 feet underground in the middle of the basin, about 15 miles north of the Seismic Response Area. The federal government has approved a controversial second high-level nuclear waste storage facility in the area, that one for waste from the nuclear power industry.

Meanwhile, the amount of wastewater that operators would like to inject in the ground keeps growing as oil and gas production increases. Last year, the industry generated more than 2.3 billion barrels of toxic wastewater in New Mexico, more than three times the amount of fresh water used per year in Albuquerque, the state’s largest metro area. That reflects a 220% increase over the amount that came out of the ground annually when Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham was first elected in 2018. All of that wastewater in a perennially dry state gave the governor an idea.

In the last legislative session, Lujan Grisham proposed a new program that would buy brackish water from deep natural aquifers or wastewater from oil and gas producers and sell it to companies that would clean it up and resell it to industries that use water for their operation, such as solar panel manufacturing and hydrogen production. Of the two water types, produced water is the most readily available since the oil and gas industry produces millions of barrels of it daily. By comparison, the state doesn’t know how much brackish water may exist, or where.

The plan, as initially proposed, would have cost half a billion dollars. Industry liked the idea of being paid for its waste. The Legislature didn’t, and it failed to pass. But the idea lives on. Jodi McGinnis Porter, deputy communications director for Lujan Grisham, said the administration “remains committed to seeking investments in treating brackish and produced waters for clean energy and advanced manufacturing projects.”

Current state rules allow oilfield wastewater to be used only in oilfield operations or reinjected in the ground. Any other use is illegal. For nearly five years, companies — overseen by the state’s Produced Water Research Consortium at New Mexico State University — have conducted sometimes controversial pilot projects as they attempt to clean oilfield wastewater to a level that the Environment Department might allow it to be used outside the oilfields. After the legislative session, the New Mexico Environment Department proposed changes to the rules that would be the first necessary step for Lujan Grisham’s plan.

They would allow wastewater to be used outside oilfields after it has been cleaned in an approved way and to an approved level. New Mexico’s Water Quality Control Commission held its latest round of hearings on the proposal in mid-August following initial hearings in May.

Norm Gaume, the former director of the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission who spent a dozen years as an operations and maintenance manager of Albuquerque’s water, wastewater and stormwater pumping systems, has his doubts about the state’s proposed rule changes.

After nearly five years, “The pilot projects to date have produced no data that meets any standards of science,” he testified. That science is hard. Generally speaking, testing for chemicals in water requires you to know what chemicals you’re looking for in the first place, and it’s not always known what is coming out of a well. Companies often use proprietary drilling chemicals that have been ruled trade secrets. And everything that goes down a well bore during drilling — including “ trade secrets ” — comes back up with the oil, gas and briney produced water.

A scientific paper submitted into evidence for the hearing by the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association — which strongly favors Lujan Grisham’s plan — indicated just how difficult it is to clean so-called produced water. The paper’s authors, who include researchers from New Mexico State University, studied wastewater treatment processes and found that some actually created new chemical compounds that “exhibited levels of toxicity ranging from very high to high in one or more toxicity categories.” In effect, the water treatment ended up creating new toxic chemicals.

Mariel Nanasi, a lawyer and executive director of New Energy Economy , a green energy advocacy group, vigorously fought the rule changes during the hearings, and wants to make sure that people don’t confuse produced water with fresh water.

“Just because Clorox and butter are both sold in a supermarket, that does not mean that they have anything to do with each other,” she said.

And if it were possible to economically clean the pollution from produced water, she said that industry would already be doing it. “They have scientists at work all the time. If this were feasible, they would produce the science and produce the evidence to demonstrate that they could treat oil and gas waste,” she said. “But they can’t. And it’s obvious.”

A final ruling on the proposed produced water rules changes by the Water Quality Control Commission is expected late this year or early in 2025..