A drilling rig looms over a county road leading out of Loving, NM. The operation filled the air with the strong scent of petrochemical fumes. (Photo by Jerry Redfern / Capital & Main)
It’s a mid-September afternoon in Loving, a village of 1,400 in far southeastern New Mexico. The firm wind blowing out of Texas brings a light grit that settles in the hair and eyes. The wind carries the faint perfume of hydrocarbons — hints of plastic, hints of glue, hints of gasoline — picked up as it crosses the most productive portion of the most productive oilfield in the country, the Permian Basin. As the wind blows north, the dust and chemicals turn the morning sky from a light blue to a hazy white. In a couple of hours the air will carry the sizzling tang of ozone, eyes will burn, lungs will ache, and distant landmarks will lose their detail and filter into shades of light gray.
And it’s not even a bad pollution day.
Sixty-one years ago, Congress passed the Clean Air Act to control the nation’s air pollution. The Environmental Protection Agency was created, in part, to implement the 1970 update of the act, which was a response to pollution — such as ozone — in the country’s largest cities. Pollution doesn’t happen only in cities, though, and air monitors in New Mexico’s part of the Permian Basin regularly record ozone levels that exceed what’s deemed safe to breathe under the act’s guidelines.
And for most of the past year, officials at the EPA told the secretary of the New Mexico Environment Department that a federal fix for Permian Basin’s air pollution was imminent.
It took just one day in November to change that.
“It is likely no longer imminent,” James Kenney, the state’s Environment Department secretary, said after Donald Trump’s election to a second term. A climate change denier, Trump rides into office again on a platform promising increased fossil fuel production and reductions in federal oversight of the oil and gas industry. During the campaign, he asked oil and gas executives for a billion dollars in exchange for undoing Biden administration environmental rules. And on Monday, Trump named former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin to run the EPA and roll back Biden’s climate agenda. “He will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions,” Trump said.
In his first tweet after the announcement, Zeldin said he will “restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry, bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI,” none of which are part of the EPA’s mandate. Both Trump and Zeldin pledged to protect clean air and water, but in the Permian Basin, the air and water are polluted by the very industry they both pledged to deregulate.
Some at the EPA remain optimistic, however. “Our work to implement President Biden’s agenda is undeterred,” said Joe Robledo, spokesperson for EPA’s Region 6, which covers New Mexico. “We are still doing our jobs and will continue to deliver results for the American people.”
Others are less optimistic. “The assaults on EPA will likely come from many fronts,” Kenney said. He was appointed New Mexico Environment Department secretary after years working at the EPA in rules enforcement, much of that in oil and gas operations. Kenney said that pressure from the White House, reduced enforcement by national and regional directors and reduced congressional funding “will have the effect of eroding or dismantling the agency.”
Furthermore, he thinks the relationship between the state and the federal Justice Department will be turned on its head. “I expect the Trump administration to again weaponize its Department of Justice against states like New Mexico,” Kenney said.
Over the past few years, the two agencies regularly partnered to prosecute flagrant oil and gas pollution violators in New Mexico. Kenney thinks the future will look more like a 2019 case during the first Trump administration in which the U.S. Air Force sued the state over the latter’s fight against toxic PFAS contamination on and around an Air Force base in eastern New Mexico. Studies conducted by the National Cancer Institute have linked PFAS exposure to various cancers.
“Dismantling environmental protections through federal lawsuits against states is likely if past is prologue,” Kenney said.
***
On the outskirts of Loving, Jozee Zuñiga waits to back her truck out of the driveway to her grandmother’s home. A stream of dump trucks blocks the road, carrying dirt for the foundation of a new oil well drilling pad a couple of hundred yards away from the front door — the third one this year. There are already 16 active or newly drilled wells within a mile, all of them on what used to be neighbors’ hay fields and pasture lands.
Zuñiga tries to stay balanced. “I know that a lot of good things have come with the industry. You know, a lot of careers, a lot of money. But we’re also seeing a lot of bad things,” she said. “In recent years, we’ve really been completely surrounded and, you know, engulfed in this industry.”
The road itself, once paved, is crumbling under the heavy truck traffic. New oil and gas pipelines were recently buried in the right-of-way in her grandmother’s backyard, churning the earth and leaving a strip of gray gravel and dirt 40 yards wide and dotted with pipeline warning stakes.
“You used to be able to go outside at night, and you could just see a beautiful sky,” she said. “There used to be clear mornings, and sometimes deer even used to come down and come through the area.” On this September day, the Guadalupe Mountains, which usually poke up 30 miles away across the plains, are lost in the haze. At night, it’s as if the brightest stars have fallen from the sky and landed atop the drilling rigs and compressor stations and flare stacks scattered across the rolling plains of the Permian Basin.
The oil and gas operations release volatile organic compounds — the same chemicals that make plastic, glue and gasoline smell like they do. The compounds are a gaseous part of the unrefined hydrocarbon cocktail that comes out of oil and gas wells and give the morning air around Loving its oilfield odor. The region’s sun and desert heat bake the compounds into ozone, leaving New Mexicans breathing air pollution linked to nosebleeds, asthma and other respiratory diseases, particularly among the young and elderly. Several of the volatile organic compounds are linked to cancers.
So far this year, a group of independent scientists has recorded ozone levels in Loving that exceeded the federal Clean Air Act limit of 70 parts per billion 54 times. The pollution levels they recorded would make Loving the fifth-most ozone-polluted area in the country, ahead of perennial pollution hotspots like New York, Dallas and Houston. Their work also shows that the wind carries the highest ozone levels when it blows into town after crossing the heart of the Permian Basin. This will be the sixth straight year that those levels in New Mexico’s portion of the Permian Basin have exceeded the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for ozone under the Clean Air Act. Three consecutive years is the threshold that could trigger an ozone nonattainment designation from the EPA, leading to a crackdown on the oil and gas industry by enacting tougher rules and greater enforcement to reduce volatile organic compounds and ozone levels.
But the EPA hasn’t done that.
“We believe in science and we believe in data,” said Kenney, the Environment Department secretary. “And the data suggests that when 50, 60% of the industry is out of compliance with state and federal [pollution] standards, it does not surprise me that the [air] monitors see that.”
Before the election, the EPA may or may not have been preparing to drop the boom on the region and mandate changes to clean the air. “May or may not” because Kenney said the EPA told him a declaration classifying New Mexico’s part of the Permian Basin as being out of compliance with the Clean Air Act was “imminent.” But, at the same time, Robledo, the EPA press officer, said the agency was waiting to see if recent state and federal rules were enough to reduce the pollution.
New Mexico implemented rules to rein in methane venting, flaring and leaks in the oil and gas industry in 2021 and volatile organic compound emissions (known as ozone precursors) in 2022, and the EPA initiated its own rules to strengthen emission reporting this year. And just this Tuesday, the Biden administration announced a “methane fee” for excess emissions of the climate-damaging gas. Meanwhile, oil production in the Permian Basin has grown more than 35% since 2021.
The likely end of the ozone designation process “is very sad and a failure I guess on the EPA’s part,” Zuñiga said. “This nonattainment zone should have been declared months ago … There was more than enough proof to say, ‘Hey, things are not great in this area.’”
She said, “Children deserve to be safe. The elderly deserve to be safe. I mean, everyone deserves to be safe, but I think, at this point in time, we should be able to give extra protections to those who can’t protect themselves.”
Such protection is the EPA’s mission: “to protect human health and the environment.” It’s the mission of New Mexico’s Environment Department, too, which leads Zuñiga to say, “With our elected officials, we depend on these people … I think it’s their responsibility to protect the people that live here.”
New Mexico’s top elected official is Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, and a clause in the Clean Air Act says state governors can ask the EPA for a nonattainment declaration, a process that begins with a simple letter. Questions sent to the governor’s office asking if she was prepared to write such a letter were redirected to Kenney.
“She absolutely could do that,” Kenney said. “We fully admit and know that the monitoring data is such that it would suggest the Permian Basin on the New Mexico side — I’m not going to speak for Texas — hits that mark … I think the governor would say that. I would say that. You hear EPA say that.”
But, he added, the letter “would effectively go nowhere,” even if Trump hadn’t been elected.
That’s because such a letter is only half the fight: The state hasn’t conducted the analyses needed to support a redesignation for the region. Kenney said there are two reasons for that. The first is that the state never budgeted the money for such a study, something he said would cost around $1 million. The second is that the EPA was working on such an analysis.
“They’ve done the modeling several times over,” Kenney said. “For about the last 18 months, on a monthly basis, I’ve been asking them, ‘Where are we?’ … They keep telling me … that they are continuing to refine the modeling to establish the boundary areas.” They told him an announcement was imminent.
“I have a different definition of ‘imminent’ when I hear that word,” he said.
For years, an air monitoring station run by the Environment Department in Carlsbad, New Mexico — a station that also serves as the EPA’s official monitor for the area — has regularly recorded ozone levels well above what the EPA needed to declare a nonattainment zone. In addition to the Carlsbad location, another monitoring station down the road in Loving, operated by a group of air quality scientists and paid for by HEI Energy, recorded even worse air quality since it started its monitoring in 2023. This is the station that recorded ozone exceeding EPA safety levels 54 days so far this year.
Despite this, Robledo said a reclassification for the Permian Basin is “at EPA’s discretion.” And he did not directly respond to Kenney’s claim that an EPA nonattainment declaration was imminent.
Drew Goretzka, communications director at the New Mexico Environment Department, said that if the EPA had designated the Permian Basin as a nonattainment area, it would lead to a dramatic increase in emissions reporting across the board; more stringent construction permits for new oil and gas facilities; and a mandate under which increases in emissions at currently permitted facilities would have to be offset with equal or greater decreases elsewhere in the nonattainment area.
But all of that is unlikely under a second Trump administration.
Jeremy Nichols, a senior advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, pointed to both agencies when assigning blame for the state’s oil and gas air pollution — but particularly the Environment Department. “It seems like at every turn all they’ve done is make excuses and blame others for the state’s pollution woes,” he said. “The state is facing its most dire threat to clean air under a second Trump administration. Now is the time for bold and courageous action to confront polluters.”
He added, “We’ll see if they rise to the challenge.”
Texas will be a spoiler in that challenge. The nation’s largest oil and gas producing state has fought the EPA over redesignating the Permian Basin in the past.
While New Mexico has some of the most stringent oil and gas production regulations in the country, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott actively fights any attempt to further regulate the industry. That leads to emissions from oil and gas facilities in Texas’ less-regulated portion of the basin blowing into New Mexico, adding to the pollution numbers.
Just after President Biden took office in January 2021, Abbott issued an executive order directing every Texas state agency “to use all lawful powers and tools to challenge any federal action that threatens the continued strength, vitality, and independence of the energy industry.” And when the EPA first proposed the idea of an ozone nonattainment zone in the Permian Basin in the spring of 2022, Abbott railed against “arbitrary and discretionary EPA bureaucrats” and their “draconian regulations.” He later took credit when the Biden administration backed off that EPA proposal in January 2023, as post-COVID inflation and the Russian invasion of Ukraine led to increased gas prices.
A 2019 report from the research and advocacy group Environment Texas tallied the emissions from self-reported Clean Air Act violations at industrial facilities across Texas. Most came from oil and gas processing facilities, and the Permian Basin region reported the highest emissions of those chemicals — by far.
“There’s no way Texas won’t be implicated” in New Mexico’s air pollution, Nichols said.
“EPA’s probably going to be more hands-off, so it will likely mean more lawlessness,” he said. “In all likelihood, it will be nongovernmental organizations like ours stepping up to pick up the enforcement slack.”
***
Ervie Ornelas looks back on the place where he grew up compared to Loving as it is today. “I was born and raised here, as my father was,” he said. He sits at a picnic bench in Ervell M. Guevara Memorial Park — the village’s only park, named for his father’s best friend, a Marine who died in the Vietnam War. “I’m named after that gentleman,” Ornelas said. And then he points to three new oil wells he can just make out from where he’s sitting. He says he’s been hassled when he’s spoken out against this kind of backyard oil and gas drilling in the past.
“I tell everybody I’m not against oil companies,” he said. “I’m all for making money for our town. But what I’m against is what they leave behind.”
As he drives a little way out of town, Ornelas passes a 125-foot drilling rig that towers over the road. It envelops passing cars with a potent vapor that smells like a mix of fingernail polish and paint thinner. The resident of the nearest house, which sits about 1,000 feet away, wouldn’t talk about the oil well next door.
Ornelas ends up at a spot along the Pecos River where he fished as a kid. Today the spot is covered in garbage and spent gun shells. The river is small, slack and algae-choked. A pile of discarded big-rig tires lies by the road, and oilfield trucks occasionally drive by. Power poles and flare stacks from a pair of new oil and gas wells now overlook the spot.
“I liked the old way, the Mother Nature way,” Ornelas said. “Back in the day, it was rugged.”
That included wildlife. He drives another mile to a spot where he and his father-in-law used to find burrowing ground owls. “All gone,” Ornelas said. He stands at the barbed wire fence surrounding the land where the owls used to live. It’s been scraped clean, and a pair of cranes assemble six new side-by-side oil wells for Chevron. “It’s all nothing but pure oil stuff now, and that, that was heartbreaking.”
Ornelas moved away several years ago for family and work in the bigger city of Carlsbad (population 31,000) to the north. “But I come here every other day, every other day, just to be in my hometown,” he said. “And it don’t even feel like my hometown anymore.”
Until four years ago, his mother lived in a small house that overlooked the fields at the edge of town. Then an oil well supply company set up shop across the street. “She couldn’t even talk on the phone outside anymore. It was so loud, you know? And that was sad.” He believes her death was due in part to the dust and fumes that wafted across the street. Ornelas’ son died two weeks before her of a brain tumor. He doesn’t know if the air pollution had anything to do with his death, but, he says, it didn’t help.
“The people that really know me know I’m not trying to be malicious. They know I’m worried about my hometown,” Ornelas said. Even so, “I hate to say this. I’m glad my mother’s not here to see what this town has become.”