Speculative Water Grab Threatens Clean Water in the San Juan Basin

Challenge Implicates Unsustainability of Widespread Fracking

Additional contact:  Tim Ream, Climate & Energy Campaign Director, 541-531-8541 


Santa Fe, NM–With hopes of profiteering from the San Juan Basin’s oil and gas boom, Schmitz Land, LLC applied to transfer its household water permit to fuel fracking on over a million acres of land in Rio Arriba, San Juan and Sandoval Counties in northern New Mexico. WildEarth Guardians filed a challenge this week with the State Engineer asking the agency to deny the permit as contrary to the public welfare because such it would lead to permanent mining of our aquifers and pollution of our waterways and water supplies.

“If permitted, the table will be set for water transfers that will squander the public’s precious clean water for short-term profits for the few at the expense of the environment and public health for everyone,” said Jen Pelz, wild rivers program director at WildEarth Guardians. “Water is scarce in the arid southwest and permanently consuming and polluting it to frack oil and gas should be prohibited.”

The Schmitz Land application requests from the State a change in the type of use of 28 acre-feet of water per year (enough to serve 56 average homes) from household, livestock and wildlife uses to industrial oil field water and firefighting uses. Under the current use, the majority of the water taken from the aquifer returns back to the underground basin or to rivers and streams with little to no impact on its quality. However, if the water is used for hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling (“fracking”), the water pumped from the aquifer will be permanently rendered so polluted with chemicals, heavy metals, and radioactivity that it will be unusable. That water is then injected into deep geologic formations with hopes that it will not resurface.

Schmitz Land also requests a change in the location of where the water can be used. However, it cannot, or will not, identify the new place of use with any detail; the new location is described as somewhere within one million acres in three different counties, including public lands managed by the U.S Bureau of Land Management. Such lack of specificity suggests that Schmitz land merely wishes to be the first in line to cash in on any oil and gas development in the region by having a permit ready and willing to sell to the highest bidder.

“The oil and gas industry in the San Juan Basin is already causing serious air pollution problems, ruining stunning vistas, and driving off wildlife ,” said Tim Ream, climate and energy campaign director at Guardians. “Now the fracking speculators are coming for the rivers. The State Engineer has to stop this.”

WildEarth Guardians is a nonprofit environmental organization dedicated to protecting and restoring the wildlife, wild places, wild rivers and health of the American West.


 

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