This story was originally published by Capital & Main.
It’s an early May afternoon, and Charlie Barrett has parked his pickup in a pullout along a county road a few hundred feet from the Black River in southern New Mexico, just a mile from where it empties into the Pecos River.
He has stopped to set up a video camera that detects heat and gasses invisible to the eye to check for emissions at a nearby oil and gas operation.
Stepping out of the truck, Barrett finds the pullout muddy and dotted with puddles — an anomaly during an ongoing drought. A gray chunk of salt the size of a medicine ball sits near a mud puddle flecked with shimmering, white crystals.
“Unfortunately this is pretty common,” he said. “It’s also quite dangerous.” It appeared that someone had dumped oilfield wastewater — also known as produced water — at the pullout. The extremely saline and toxic byproduct of oil and gas production carries a mix of petroleum compounds and oilfield chemicals. Produced water can be radioactive, too. Barrett said he worries that people would unwittingly drive through the muck or pull off the road and walk through it.
All day, every day, hundreds of semi trucks haul the toxic produced water from well sites to disposal stations along the highways and backroads of this far corner of New Mexico. That water is an unwanted byproduct of oil and gas development. More than three barrels of wastewater come out of the ground for every barrel of extracted oil, on average in New Mexico. As fossil fuel production has skyrocketed in the Permian Basin, the amount of produced water has followed. In addition, the water-to-oil ratio increases as wells and oilfields age — a process known as “watering out.”
New Mexico state rules ban produced water use for anything outside the oilfield. This has led to a parallel industry devoted to gathering, transporting and reinjecting produced water deep underground. That, in turn, has led to a rise in seismic activity in the region, as well as dramatic blowouts that spew toxic water when injection wells fail.
Barrett works for industry watchdog Oilfield Witness as a thermographer, using a thermal camera to measure gaseous emissions from oilfield equipment. As he set up to record, produced water trucks rumbled by under a cloudless sky.
Barrett began filming. “Oh, man, that’s fucking terrible,” he said. On its small screen, in wavy, candy-colored hues, the camera revealed the heat signatures of three active flares near a house. “Got a person’s home here and then this mess … all producing CO2 and methane and other volatile organic compounds, blowing right into their home,” he said, looking through the viewfinder. “Jesus, man. It’s ridiculous.”
When he looked at the footage later on a bigger screen, he found another lit flare in the video, in addition to the first three. One shot — four flares. This despite the fact that New Mexico has banned nearly all flaring since 2022.
Companies burn off — or “flare” — natural gas for a few reasons, including: it doesn’t meet specifications; it is over pressurized in a pipeline; or it’s required for equipment maintenance. Though better for the climate than venting unburned gas into the atmosphere, flaring still produces carbon dioxide and other toxic pollutants.
Later, Barrett sat on a small boulder along a quiet bend in the Pecos River, talking about his work. The river gurgled; dragonflies hovered, and the grasses rustled as more oilfield trucks rumbled over a nearby bridge, a reminder that Barrett was sitting in one of the most prolific fossil fuel basins on the planet.
“It sucks,” he said. “It’s a beautiful river in the middle of a hellscape.”
Several months earlier, the last time Barrett visited this spot, he found salt deposits covering the ground between the bridge and the riverbank. “I mean, the whole road was flooded over,” he said. “We couldn’t confirm one way or another if that was an actual produced water spill,” he added, but there are few other possibilities.
Such a spill would represent another environmental shock for this troubled river. The irony: The river needs more water. U.S. Geological Survey data going back nearly 40 years shows the annual snowpack slowly but steadily declining in the mountains around the Pecos River’s headwaters. River flow measurements in the upriver town of Pecos show the same.
As climate change heats and dries New Mexico, and the Pecos River runs ever lower, one of the biggest drivers of that change sits atop the river’s banks, just feet from where Barrett sits — 75,000 square miles of oil and gas wells across 55 counties in New Mexico and Texas: the vast Permian Basin.
Water and geology
The Pecos River, favorite of Looney Tunes character Yosemite Sam and the historic demarcation line of the Wild West, starts among some of New Mexico’s highest mountains east of Santa Fe and runs south for more than 500 miles before entering Texas at New Mexico’s lowest point.
Its headwaters rush untamed through miles of steep canyons and pine-covered slopes, garnering it a National Wild and Scenic River designation. Its waters nourish farms and ranches across the center of New Mexico. But where it exits the state, the Pecos looks more like a tightly managed creek — a conveyance delivering carefully tallied water through the middle of the Permian Basin, the country’s most productive oil and gas region.
The environmental group American Rivers has twice named the Pecos one of the country’s most endangered rivers: once in 2024, along with New Mexico’s other waterways, and in 2021 all on its own.
Both the river and the Permian Basin are natural features of a landscape transmogrified by the human desire for energy from fossil fuels.
Over the last century, people have drilled tens of thousands of wells, stitched the basin with pipes and released carbon trapped tens of millions of years ago, all to power cars and jets and buildings. That released carbon changed the chemistry of the atmosphere, trapping heat that warms the planet and dries New Mexico.
Meanwhile, on the Pecos, as on other rivers across the state, there is a greater demand for less and less water year after year. Last winter’s snow bust only added to the pressure.
“It is totally terrifying in a lot of ways,” said Hannah Riseley-White, the director of the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission. Her job is to make sure that the state meets its obligations to all of the groups that have a stake in river water.
“Everyone this spring got tired of me at the beginning of every meeting screen-sharing the snowpack figures for all of the basins that we manage,” she said. “It fell off the cliff. It wasn’t just record breaking. It was beyond anything that we could have imagined in terms of snowpack.”
The previous winter wasn’t much better. Neither are the long-term forecasts. Riseley-White said she expects a 25% to 30% decrease in river water by 2070.
“So the biggest challenge that the Pecos faces is just aridification due to climate change,” she said.
The percentages come from New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s 50-Year Water Action Plan, which lays out how global warming will shrink New Mexico’s water supplies in coming decades. It also proposes how to conserve existing supplies and create new water sources in a very dry state. That includes treating oilfield wastewater — the stuff Barrett believes he found on the roadside — to make it clean enough that the state will allow it to be used outside the oilfield for industrial and other, broader uses.
“The industry’s actually advocating for repurposing produced water and pumping it into this river,” Barrett said, while sitting beside the Pecos.
To date, the legal maneuvering to make that happen has been unsuccessful. A recent push to change state rules and allow the broad use of treated wastewater ended when Lujan Grisham appeared to have influenced a rulemaking body’s deliberations. Another push to change state rules is underway, but no deadlines have been set. State environmental groups strongly oppose the idea, arguing that it’s not possible to be 100% sure that all toxic chemicals are removed from the water.
Meanwhile, over the border, the Texas branch of the Sierra Club has tallied five proposals to discharge treated produced water into the Texas portion of the Pecos River watershed, though none have yet been approved.
“Do I think [treated] produced water will solve all of our problems in the Pecos? No,” Riseley-White said. “But thinking about it as one of the many sort of tools in the toolbox I think makes sense.”
She added: “Part of coming up with creative solutions is going to necessarily require looking at all of the options, and that’s certainly one of them. And I think technology is there to clean water to various standards. It’s just a question of whether financially the incentives are there.”
Other dangers
Endangered animals live along the Pecos River, including the dunes sagebrush lizard and the Texas hornshell mussel. The lesser prairie chicken was part of that group until the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service formally removed its protections under the Endangered Species Act in early 2026, despite its declining population.
“There’s going to be just increasing challenges in ensuring that there’s sufficient water for those species, just like for the other users that depend on it,” Riseley-White said. One successful example: While working with the hornshell on a tributary of the Pecos, “landowners recognized that if there was water in the Black [River] for the hornshell, that meant that there was water there for them, too,” she said.
The latest challenges to endangered animals’ survival comes from Washington. In early July, the Department of the Interior rolled back the definition of “harm” to mean only directly injuring or killing endangered species. Noise and habitat destruction would no longer be considered threats to an endangered species’ well-being.
In late July, the department rescinded the so-called “blanket rule” that covered threatened species with many of the same protections afforded endangered species. It also imposed consideration of the economic cost of protecting plants and animals — i.e. the additional costs to oil and gas production.
Taken together, the two changes undo historic protections for plants and animals across the country, including those that call the Pecos River watershed home. Of the thousands of oil and gas wells that pierce the ground in New Mexico’s share of the Permian Basin, 380 are within a half mile of the river. Another 11 injection wells — used to dispose of produced water — lie within that same stretch.
“The sound pollution and light pollution also affect this river ecosystem,” Barrett said. He studied ecology and wildlife management and previously worked for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and the Texas A&M Forest Service as a staff ecologist. He said the oilfield disturbance “drives a lot of species away from this ecosystem, which can lead to extirpation, which is regional extinction.”
Despite the enormous challenges, Riseley-White said she remains optimistic.
“My hope in the Pecos is that as we face these challenges, we can get all of the different interests at the table and find solutions that make sense to everybody,” she said.
“I think it’s challenging, but I think it’s definitely possible,” she said.
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