70-foot wastewater geyser reflects New Mexico’s latest oilfield challenge

At first, he thought it was smoke. Jackie Onsurez was driving the bustling New Mexico highway between his home in Loving and nearby Carlsbad last Tuesday evening when he thought the smoke didn’t look right. As he pulled closer, he saw that the 70-foot plume was actually a roaring geyser of toxic oilfield wastewater, commonly called produced water, spewing from a pipe at a site operated by NGL Energy Partners. Onsurez, who until recently was running for the state’s lieutenant governor position, said he called NGL, 911, the New Mexico Environment Department and others. He was at the site for a few minutes when an oilfield roughneck arrived in a pickup truck and tried to stop the spraying water but couldn’t. Stills from video footage of a geyser of oilfield wastewater at a site operated by NGL Energy Partners in southeast New Mexico. Courtesy of Jackie Onsurez He said the man then “started to haul ass out of there. He said, ‘Get out of here. There’s gas coming out. I don’t know what’s there. Get out, get out!’” Onsurez didn’t leave, though. He is an engineer and serves on the New Mexico State Emergency Response Commission — the day before, he had attended a commission meeting on hazardous materials spills. The serendipity wasn’t lost on him. “I was able to observe firsthand the equipment and the training and everything else that’s needed for here [in the oilfield],” he said. “The only people that had protective gear was the fire department when they arrived.” The fire department cordoned off the area a few minutes after the roughneck fled. NGL representatives arrived soon after and shut off the shooting water. By that point, Onsurez had been at the site for about a half hour. He didn’t know how long it had been spewing before he arrived. The contaminated water flowed across the road and ran into a nearby drainage ditch. Onsurez had also called Alisa Ogden, a farmer and rancher and member of the Carlsbad Soil and Water Conservation District, to let the group know of the