2019 legislative session

Lawmakers get another chance on methane regulations

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Thermal image of emissions that aren’t visible to the naked eye. Credit: Sharon Wilson, Certified Thermographer, Earthworks Oil and Gas Accountability Project. Reducing methane emissions from the state’s oil and gas industry was among the promises Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham made in her campaign, reiterated in her state-of-the-state speech in January and then acted on in an executive order. The order cites leaked, vented, and flared natural gas, the primary component of methane, as costing the state $244 million a year, and directs  state agencies to develop a regulatory framework for those reductions from both new and existing sources. Methane, often released from oil and gas development, ranks among the most potent greenhouse gases, with a short-term warming potential that far exceeds that of carbon dioxide.

2019 legislative session

Proposed oil regulation would increase transparency on spills, violations

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In mid-February, 300 barrels of crude oil and 1,000 barrels of the salty, chemical-laden water that comes out of the ground along with fossil fuel spilled from a pipeline in northwestern New Mexico and ran for 1.6 miles down a wash. An employee with the company that runs the pipeline called the Oil Conservation Division. The agency’s online incident report describes an effort to stop the spread with earthen dikes and berms. Then, it snowed, covering the trail. The operator used absorbent pads and booms to try to recover some of the oil and liquids, and told the division it has plans to flush the area with fresh water to move the contaminants to a single collection point. Weeks later, the records don’t show whether the cleanup of either the water or oil was successful.

2019 legislative session

New bill asks oil industry to pay for more of the costs of regulating it

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The state’s Oil Conservation Division has been understaffed even as its workload has skyrocketed due to the ongoing oil and gas boom. So lawmakers are looking to help out by allowing the division to charge application fees. In January, Bill Brancard, general counsel for the Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, which oversees the division, described to Senate Conservation Committee members a department unable to hold onto staff as experienced people jumped to more lucrative industry positions. They’ve been left with 19 full-time vacancies. At the same time, applications to drill have quadrupled in the last three years to 1,821 and administrative hearings have shot up from 271 to 1,502.

2019 legislative session

Life after coal: San Juan miners, economists wonder what’s next

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It’s like cruising along in a refurbished airplane, which works well enough, but isn’t shiny anymore, then looking down at a new plane and deciding to jump out to ride in that one instead. And you’ve got all the parts in your hands to make a parachute, but you’ve got to put them together on the way down. That’s how one coal miner says the planned shut down of the San Juan Generating Station and its associated mine feels right now. He was one of a trio of miners who drove the three and a half hours Thursday to tell lawmakers in Santa Fe not to forget their communities as the San Juan Generating Station is taken offline. Already, he’s transitioned his kids through a recent divorce, he told House Labor, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee members, and now he faces the end of his job sometime before the generating station shuts down in 2022 and the possibility of moving if he can’t find work.

2019 legislative session

Here comes the sun: NM lawmakers champion renewable energy

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The large meeting hall at Santa Fe’s Temple Beth Shalom was packed, nearly every seat filled and with more people standing against the walls, listening to speakers at a clean energy conference late last month. When Sen. Mimi Stewart took the mic, she admitted she’d had to illegally park to get there. The first word new Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham got in after the applause and whoops greeting her arrival was, “Wow.”

“There’s no reason New Mexico can’t be the clean energy leader in the United States,” she declared in the pep talk that followed, and promised to address issues from solar tax credits to increasing renewable energy requirements for utilities, along with a list of others. And to do them fast.

Homepage Featured

Bill seeks to close an environmental gap, without quashing business

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The methane hotspot in the northwest. The town of Mesquite, where residents worry about air quality while living adjacent to Helena Chemical, in the south. Albuquerque’s South Valley and its air quality concerns. Proponents of the Environmental Review Act, HB 206, have a list of places where people and the environment could be better protected if the state had the environmental assessment tools it lays out. The bill bogged down in four hours of questions and public comment during its first committee hearing before the House Energy, Environment and Natural Resources Committee on a Saturday in January.

Uncategorized

Oil Conservation Division could issue fines again under legislation

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For the last decade, New Mexico’s Oil Conservation Division has been like a traffic cop that can’t write speeding tickets. That’s the metaphor advocates give for a bill that would reinstate the division’s right to issue fines for bad actors, which, amid booming oil business in the southeastern parts of the state and an increase in spills documented by the department, have hovered near zero. The state’s highest court in 2009 ruled the division couldn’t issue fines because the Oil and Gas Act didn’t grant it that authority. “If you look at the way the penalties were collected, it basically fell off a cliff, and the last administration didn’t show any interest in actually enforcing our oil and gas regulations, so I think it’s time that we stepped up and got back to doing that,” said Rep. Matthew McQueen, D-Santa Fe. McQueen and Sen. Richard Martinez, D-Española, are cosponsoring SB 186, legislation that would empower the Oil Conservation Division to once again issue fines.

2019 legislative session

New bill calls for zero-carbon electricity for New Mexico

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New Mexico’s elected officials set a target of 100 percent carbon-free energy by 2045 in a bill introduced Thursday. The Energy Transition Act (SB 489), sponsored by Democratic Sens. Mimi Stewart and Jacob Candelaria and Rep. Nathan Small, adds to the Renewable Portfolio Standards already on the table. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham championed legislation introduced Feb. 1 that set a timeline for moving the state’s electricity supply from coal to solar, wind and geothermal power to 50 percent by 2030 and 80 percent by 2040.

2019 legislative session

Lawmakers seek safe passage on highways for wildlife, drivers

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Drive a rural highway, particularly in the colder months and at dusk or after dark, and the primary road game often comes down to dodging deer. Each year, drivers lose that fight, and vehicles collide with animals at least 1,600 times, according to New Mexico Department of Transportation. The department estimates that tally of officially reported accidents underrepresents the problem by half. “You stand a chance of hitting a large game animal virtually anywhere in the state,” says Mark Watson, terrestrial habitat specialist with the Department of Game and Fish. The Transportation Department’s 2016 report found 738 instances of serious injury or fatality from 2002 to 2016 as a result of these accidents.

2019 legislative session

New Mexico is getting out there with new outdoor recreation position

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Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s state of the state address mentioned a new job title in her administration: an outdoor recreation coordinator. “The outdoor recreation coordinator will work to promote and support outdoor recreation across the state,” Nora Meyers Sackett, deputy press secretary for Grisham, wrote in an email.  “Much in the same way that the film office works to facilitate film business in New Mexico, the outdoor recreation position will work with communities, outdoor recreation businesses, the hospitality industry, and our marketing and tourism sectors to further grow the industry and attract visitors to New Mexico to experience our great outdoors.”

The new position would mark another step toward New Mexico joining a growing movement to bolster the outdoor industry as an economic force. The previous administration’s #NewMexicoTrue campaign could be seen as an early foray here, and in May, Las Cruces hosted the New Mexico Outdoor Economics Conference, with a keynote speech from U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich. Sen. Jeff Steinborn and Rep. Nathan Small, both Democrats from Las Cruces, sponsored memorials requesting the tourism and economic departments study the effects of creating a state office of outdoor recreation in 2017 and 2018. The move would match one made by Colorado, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and Wyoming.