New Mexico will invest $500 million into purchasing water from controversial sources, including treated oilfield wastewater, as a means to bolster the state’s water portfolio. The purchases are the latest in a long-running series of deals dipping into untapped waters to shore up dwindling supplies as climate change and decades of overconsumption drive aridification of the Southwest.
The water would come from two resources: brackish water, from deep underground aquifers, and produced water, wastewater from oil wells and fuel. Neither resource, and especially the latter, is not immediately suitable for the customer’s maximum uses. But as classic water materials like rivers and groundwater are depleted in the Southwest, local and state governments are investing in new water resources to sustain economic and population growth, despite skepticism from environmentalists and water experts.
“In arid states like ours, each and every drop counts. Global warming highlights this fact more and more every day,” Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a news release Tuesday. “This is innovation in action: we’re leveraging the private sector for our climate resilience and protecting our valuable freshwater resources. »
Critics see the plan as a gift to the fossil fuel industry that will inspire continued oil and fuel extraction in New Mexico, where the produced water comes from, leading to higher greenhouse fuel emissions that will further warm the climate and will dry out the region.
“As your administration approves new permits for oil and fuel emissions that increase climate stress and water shortages, they will spend $500 million on industry wastewater to address the water scarcity challenge caused by their climate emissions,” said meteorologist Melissa Troutman. and power advocate with WildEarth Guardians, a nonprofit environmental organization that advocates for reforms to New Mexico’s oil and fuel regulations.
Fresh water is increasingly scarce in New Mexico. In August 2022, the Rio Grande ran dry in Albuquerque for the first time in four decades, and tensions are rising between the United States and Mexico over water availability. New Mexico also gets its water from the dwindling Colorado River and is one of the states involved in tense and ongoing negotiations over how to maintain the formula that supplies new water to another 40 million people in the region and supports the region’s important agricultural production. region. Additionally, water from nearly all aquifers in the state is already fully allocated.
This has forced states across the Southwest to look for new water supplies, with cities and states turning to desalination, complex water transfer agreements, recycling wastewater for intake, and more to try to diversify their water purses. But strong skepticism remains regarding the use of brackish water and produced water. The water produced through oil and fuel extraction not only comes from industry, primarily responsible for greenhouse fuel emissions that cause climate change, but it can also be full of a variety of poisonous chemicals.
Treating produced water according to criteria suitable for even commercial use can be expensive, critics say, and that budget can be spent more on other responses to the state’s water shortages. It’s a sentiment shared by environmentalists in New Mexico’s neighboring Texas, which earlier billed this year.
“I’m very skeptical,” said Bruce Thomson, a professor emeritus of civil engineering at the University of New Mexico, who in the past led the water resources program there.
Little is known about the hydrology of deep underground aquifers in which water is impounded, he explained, and peak basins are not refillable, meaning that once depleted, they disappear forever. He also noted that water chemistry hinders desalination and possibly even involves hazardous waste left over after desalination. And unlike seawater desalination, which can sell the brine left over from the process back to the sea, there’s no easy position to place brine scraps from desalination projects in arid, landlocked lands like New Mexico.
For produced water, all of the problems of brackish water are significantly worse and more complicated due to its toxicity and extreme salinity—typically three to four times that of ocean water, Thomson said. Neither is a real solution to the region’s increasing aridity, he said, and ultimately, New Mexico and the Southwest as a whole, will have to make the most of its dwindling water supply.
“There is no new water,” he said.
But that doesn’t mean states like New Mexico won’t try to find new supplies.
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Starting next year, the New Mexico Department of Environment will begin seeking proposals from corporations interested in offering brackish or produced water. The contracts will take the form of complex market commitments, allowing corporations to seek investments from the personal sector, for example to build sanitation facilities, with the guarantee that the State will acquire the water.
That the water will be widely used for commercial purposes, such as the construction of hydrogen, solar and wind farms, and the manufacture of goods such as microchips, although it has prospects of being used for other purposes “if processing and exigencies allow. “,” according to the state, he said.
Lujan Grisham, who made the announcement at COP28 in Dubai, told Reuters the brackish water could be used eventually for public consumption, while the produced water, which is far more toxic, would be reserved for clean energy development.
These industries, however, can consume a lot of water. The progression of hydrogen, for example, requires that water be treated with stricter criteria than those intended for consumption.
Using water not typically used for irrigation or drinking to support those industries can also help prevent more and more fresh water from being harnessed for uses that don’t need it. But as resources dwindle, water experts say even water is more suitable for commercial purposes. Desires may possibly be desired for residential use, as long as it meets admission standards.
“This is just one example of how money is spent on a so-called technology solution to a challenge that demands the development of comprehensive plans and the resolution of systemic challenges,” Troutman said.
Wyatt Myskow covers environmental news in the western United States from Phoenix as Roy W. Howard. Wyatt graduated from Arizona State University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and has previously worked for The Arizona Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education and The State Press. She has covered local government, progress news, school issues, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
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