This story is part of a collaboration with The Texas Observer, with support by the Pulitzer Center.
The fracking boom in the Permian Basin — which straddles West Texas and southeastern New Mexico — largely coincided with Republican control of much of New Mexico’s state government. Many of those elected to office in the early years of the shale rush promptly began dismantling barriers to extracting the most oil and gas at the cheapest price: Soon after winning the governorship in 2010, Republican Susana Martinez shuffled key employees in the environment department into positions where they had little expertise. During her eight-year tenure, the state legislature slashed the budget for the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division, or OCD, which oversees the oil and gas industry, by 25 percent. By 2018, half of all inspection and compliance positions were vacant.
“Their budget was gutted,” said Stephanie Garcia Richard, a Democrat and the current land commissioner in charge of overseeing drilling on state lands. “They were casting about every which way [for money]. They were a regulatory body that had no teeth and had no funding.”
Martinez’s Democratic successor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, has since made attempts to restore regulatory funding. Nevertheless, at present the two OCD districts overseeing a large portion of the Permian Basin have just seven inspectors to cover more than 50,000 square miles — an area larger than the size of Pennsylvania.
Oil and gas well inspections ensure that operators are playing by the rules: checking that wells aren’t leaking underground, that there haven’t been spills, and that operators have appropriate signage around well sites. But a review of more than three decades of state records by Grist and the Texas Observer shows just how rare such inspections have become. Since 1988, OCD has inspected each oil and gas well about every two years on average. And inspections are becoming even more infrequent: While the agency averaged about 52,000 inspections each year during the Martinez administration, only about 30,000 were done in 2019 and 41,000 in 2020.
Across the border in Texas, there are 405,000 more oil and gas wells, but enforcement — which is conducted by the misleadingly-named Railroad Commission — is similarly sparse. An analysis of the Commission’s enforcement data by Grist and the Texas Observer found that the agency conducts about 140,000 inspections a year and issues about 32,000 violations. The vast majority of these violations are for leaving wells unplugged despite years of inactivity, not cleaning up spills and leaks, and for not posting the right signage next to a well. They are all for the most part considered “minor” violations by the state. Of the 178,141 violations issued since 2015, just 73 — 0.04 percent — were considered “major” violations, which carry fines of up to $10,000 per day. Most violators do not face fines. The agency’s data show that less than 10 percent of violations are referred to its legal department for enforcement.
New Mexico’s OCD reports both on-site field visits and file reviews as inspections but does not differentiate between the two. It’s unclear exactly how many inspections were conducted in person, but the New Mexico data suggest that a significant number are done from a desk — which could be a problem, since it’s hard to identify an oil leak or see a piece of faulty equipment without inspecting the actual well site. OCD inspectors each conducted around 3,000 inspections on average every year since 2016, which works out to about 11 inspections per day.
“That number makes it seem like [the inspections] must be something that most people wouldn’t think is an inspection,” said Nathalie Eddy, an environmental advocate with the nonprofit Earthworks who routinely surveys oil and gas sites in Colorado and New Mexico. “Most people think that ‘inspection’ means someone of authority shows up unannounced and does a spot inspection.”