This week the legislature opened the 2024 session and at least one lawmaker is hoping to put tighter regulations on the state’s oil and gas industry.
KUNM sat down with Democratic Representative Debbie Sariñana (D-Albuquerque) to talk about her proposed bills and why she sees them as so important in the face of climate change.
DEBBIE SARIÑANA: Right now New Mexico's in a mega drought. We need to use our water wisely. This bill [HB 30] just says you can only use so much fresh water to frack. We'd like to see no fresh water, but you can only use what absolutely needs to be used for fracking. Otherwise, they use the produced or recycled water instead.
KUNM: I did know the Governor has outlined a $500 million plan to develop a new source of water for industry uses by treating the used, salty byproduct of their drilling. How does your legislation build on what the governor wants?
SARIÑANA: We have not been really given the specifics on what she wants. From what I've understood, from what I've heard, we were going to pay gas and oil for this waste that they're already producing. We're going to pay them to clean it up; this is something I believe they should already be doing. So, I don't understand what she's doing. We haven't heard much on it. She never informed us. So, I can't really help you on that.
KUNM: There's HB 31 and 32 as well. There's the oil and gas, liquid spills and protections... Can you briefly just touch on those really quickly?
SARIÑANA: Sure, let's do the spills one. That’s easy. Right now we have four spills, on average, a day in New Mexico. So about 1500 spills a year. The oil conservation department that has to deal with leaks is not able to. They have a 16,000 spill backlog. So, this is to make sure we, as the legislature, give them enough money. And hopefully, they can find enough people to do inspections and compliance. And that's what this is for: keeping everybody healthy while we do this.
KUNM: The most interesting one, I think, is House Bill 32 with these "children's health protection zones." Can you touch on that?
SARIÑANA: Yes. So I was a teacher. High school and middle school math teacher. And right now we have over 34,000 kids who live within a mile of the gas and oil extraction site. So, that means they're exposed to methane and co2. That means cancer and asthma and birth defects all these things that could possibly happen. I was amazed that there's certain schools that have over 100 extraction wells just surrounding them up in Eunice and there's some with quite a few wells up in the Farmington area and Aztec. This is to say, we need to push back a mile from schools, any extraction site and those that are already within the mile, we want to give them up to, I think, 2027 to close and seal their pumps.
KUNM: How do you make sure state agencies have the staffing to enforce these regulations?
SARIÑANA: The problem is, it's not the money. We have FTEs, we have slots for them. They can't fill them because we don't pay enough. Paying the people better rates, so we can keep them instead of them going off to other industries. We don't have a competitive rate. We can't keep people, we can't fill positions. And I asked him back in May: 'Okay, so if we can't keep positions, can we contract out?' Right now, they are only inspecting like 3% of the wells. So, if we have 66,000 wells, that's maybe 2000, maybe between two and 3000 wells a year. That's ridiculous. I've been asking them these questions... Why is the environment just stuck in the back? You know, climate change is real. We have people getting sick from all these emissions. Why isn't it in the forefront?
