In southern New Mexico, the Black and Pecos rivers run through the edge of the Permian Basin, where Charlie Barrett of Oilfield Witness uses a thermal camera to document emissions. On a recent trip he found muddy pullouts dotted with salt deposits he believed came from dumped oilfield wastewater, a saline, toxic byproduct of oil and gas extraction. He also counted four active flares near a house through thermal footage, even though New Mexico has banned nearly all flaring since 2022.
Produced water is a growing problem: New Mexico gets more than three barrels of wastewater for every barrel of oil, and older fields produce even more. State rules restrict its use to oilfield operations, so companies truck it to disposal wells and inject it underground. That has coincided with more seismic activity and blowouts that can spray toxic water, adding risk to a river that American Rivers has twice named among the country’s most endangered.
Meanwhile the river is drying as climate change shrinks the mountain snowpack that feeds its headwaters. The same fossil-fuel infrastructure that pollutes the river also drives the warming that reduces its flow, leaving, as Barrett put it, a “beautiful river in the middle of a hellscape.”