At first he thought it was smoke.
Jackie Onschless was driving on a busy New Mexico highway between her home in Loving and nearby Carlsbad last Tuesday evening when she noticed something strange about the smoke. As he got closer, he discovered that the 70-foot plume was actually a roaring geyser of toxic oil field wastewater (commonly referred to as produced water) spewing out of pipes at a site operated by NGL Energy Partners.
Onsrez, who was most recently running for lieutenant governor, said he called NGL, 911, the New Mexico Department of Environmental Protection and others. He was on the scene for a few minutes when oilfield roughnecks arrived in a pickup truck and tried to stop the spraying water, but were unable to do so.
The man then “started pulling his ass out of there. He said, ‘Get out of here. There’s gas. I don’t know what’s in there. Get out, get out!'”
Video courtesy of Jackie Onshless.
However, Onsurez did not leave. He is an engineer and serves on the New Mexico Emergency Response Commission. The previous day, he had attended a meeting of the Committee on Spills of Hazardous Materials. The chance encounter was unforgettable for him.
“I was able to see first-hand the equipment, the training and everything else that is needed here (in the oil field),” he said. “The fire department was the only one that had protective equipment when we arrived.”
The fire department cordoned off the area minutes after the vandals fled. NGL representatives quickly arrived and stopped the shooting. Onslez had been on scene for about 30 minutes at that point. He had no idea how long he had been squirting until he arrived.
The contaminated water flowed across the road and into a nearby drainage ditch. Onsrez also called Alisa Ogden, a member of the Carlsbad Soil and Water Conservation District and a farmer and rancher, to inform the group about the spill.
“I said, ‘Mr. Ogden, I don’t want to bother you, but it looks like this is going into your acequia,'” Onslez said, using a common Spanish term for traditional Southwest water systems.
“If you don’t know what’s going to happen, you can’t do anything about it,” Ogden later said. “Thankfully, Jackie saw it and alerted us right away, so we were able to take immediate action and prevent the produced water from flowing toward the Pecos River,” she said.
“It’s not something that’s going to keep me up at night, but because we have oil fields here, there’s always a risk of that happening,” Ogden said.
A 1-inch nipple in a high-pressure water injection line broke, leading to the blowout, according to a report filed by NGL with the New Mexico Petroleum Conservation Department. The report said 40 barrels of produced water spilled, 10 of which were recovered. The remaining 30 fish washed into a nearby ditch.
Sidney Hill, a spokeswoman for the New Mexico Department of Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources, which oversees the petroleum conservation division, said NGL is taking samples from the ditch and “expects to receive them sometime this week.”
“Accidents happen,” Ogden said. “We’ve all had accidents happen. It’s your reaction to an accident.”
She said NGL was responsible and agreed to do the cleanup. “They did everything they could at the time,” she said. “Once we get all the samples and everything back, we’re going to come up with a plan for what they need to do.”
NGL did not respond to requests for comment by phone or email.
Video courtesy of Jackie Onshless.
In December 2024, state Petroleum Conservation Department inspectors discovered wastewater leaking from a pump in the cement slab at the well site. Asked by Capital & Main about a scheduled three-month follow-up visit that was not listed in the well file, Hill said, “Thank you for pointing out that we are past our compliance obligations. We will investigate why it has not been shut down, but it does not appear to be related to this release.”
NGL transports oil, gas and wastewater from the Gulf Coast, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas and New Mexico to fields. Also growing is the business of disposing of produced water in deep injection wells like the one just north of Loving. In its annual report, the company claimed to be the largest independent wastewater transportation and treatment company in the United States, treating nearly 1 billion barrels of toxic water across its operations last year.
In the larger scheme of New Mexico’s sewage spills, the NGL incident was notable for its visibility rather than its size. From January 1st to May 19th, 48 companies reported 356 spills, resulting in the loss of 15,335 barrels of wastewater across the state. The largest was a 2,000-barrel spill by Hilcorp Energy in January just 400 feet from the north Farmington neighborhood. Devon Energy Corporation has reported the most wastewater spills to date with 93, compared to NGL with three.
But last week’s brackish geyser highlighted one of the fastest-growing controversies in New Mexico’s oil and gas industry: what to do with the water it produces. In 2025, oil producers brought more than 800 million barrels of oil and more than 2.7 billion barrels of wastewater into the state. These barrels of wastewater are increasing as oil and gas production increases, and their total has doubled since 2020. There’s little agreement on what to do with it all.
This water occurs naturally in oil and gas formations, has a high salt concentration, and contains petroleum-based chemicals. This often includes radioactive materials and may include chemical mixtures that companies inject into wells during hydraulic fracturing and production processes. Recipes for these cocktails are often protected as trade secrets and can vary widely from well to well. Essentially, this water is toxic and prohibited in New Mexico from being used outside the oil field for any purpose other than testing.
Although wastewater can be used to drill new wells, the most common disposal method is underground disposal wells, such as the well near Rubbing, where the water is reinjected into the rock formation under extreme pressure.
According to a report filed by NGL with the Petroleum Conservation Service, the nipple that broke was on a pipeline that was under pressure of 2,600 pounds per square inch. But the state is running out of injection sites as the intense pressure from the injections fills and shifts rock layers, resulting in earthquake swarms in the Permian Basin in both Texas and New Mexico. In addition, high-pressure wastewater deposits are breaking through old oil and gas wells, causing salt water leaks and geysers.
A proposal from the Water, Access, Treatment and Reuse Alliance, an industry group, that would allow wastewater to be treated and used outside the oil industry has been submitted again to the state Water Quality Control Board. The facility was decommissioned last year after an uproar in which Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham appeared to pressure the commission to repeal a recently enacted ban on wastewater use outside oilfields. Previous proposals had argued that the treated water could be used in other industries or discharged into lakes and streams, but its use in a state still suffering from decades of drought is highly controversial.
In separate interviews, lead attorneys on each side of the debate addressed each other’s arguments.
Matthias Sayer, co-founder of the partnership, said he sees treated water as “a new source of water supply and a reduction in the burden on current management systems.”
Sayer said, “Spills occur because the management of oil field (wastewater) water is large-scale, continuous, and operationally complex. … This does not mean that spills will be tolerated, but it explains why a system built around moving very large volumes of highly saline water will continue to experience (spills) unless the nation improves its infrastructure and creates better incentives for treatment, recycling, and beneficial reuse.”
“The main argument that industry is making is that reusing produced water is one solution to the water scarcity problem, and we disagree with that. This is not a silver bullet,” said Tanith Fox, a senior attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center and lead counsel for the wastewater reclamation proposal.
Thayer said a “robust body of science” shows that oilfield wastewater can be treated and safely reused. “The question is not whether we can do it, but how we create the rules to properly manage risk,” he said. “That question can be answered by engaging the science and the experts behind it.”
“There’s understandably important debate about what the science is telling us,” Fox said. She and others are skeptical that new water treatment processes will reliably clean up what comes out of the ground. Water testing typically begins by looking for known contaminants that may be present in the water.
However, she said, “The hydraulic fracturing fluids used by industry are protected by trade secret rules, so we cannot know all the components of the produced water.” Additionally, basic water chemistry and salinity vary widely from state to state. The lack of clarity about what’s in the water “is a problem for emergency responders when they don’t know what’s in the liquid,” she added, in a nod to the Loving spill.
Additionally, Fox said there is no widespread testing. “There is no large-scale research. There is no large-scale discharge. There is no large-scale treatment. Reuse of produced water on an industrial scale is not yet a reality. So it is not a solution to tomorrow’s water shortages,” she said.
“If the (Water Quality Control Board) approves the rules, the system will inevitably strengthen organically,” Thayer said. “This is a runway, not a light switch.”
“Industry is inherently dirty, and it’s clear that the world needs energy, and the sooner we get to clean energy, the better,” Fox said.
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