One could make a strong argument that New Mexico is peppered with more than 50,000 active water wells that happen to produce oil and gas. Those wells draw more than three barrels of water for each barrel of oil, but it’s not anything you’d want to drink or water your chiles with. That wastewater — also called produced water — is highly saline, chemical-laden and often radioactive.
And as the state’s oil and gas production again rises to some of its highest levels ever, wastewater amounts rise as well. In 2025, New Mexico’s oil and gas producers drew more than 800 million barrels of oil and 2.7 billion barrels of wastewater out of the ground.
That’s a multifaceted problem. The water is poisonous, few people want it, and its disposal creates expensive knock-on effects. Last year, a Dallas Federal Reserve Bank report said that 75% of more than 100 oil executives surveyed expected that by 2031, wastewater disposal problems will throttle oil and gas production in the Permian Basin, the most productive oil and gas field in the country. And all of that water leads to some spectacular accidents.
New Mexico’s Water Quality Control Commission regulates how and where that toxic water can be used, and it’s a short list — it can be used in closed-loop testing projects or oilfield applications like drilling wells, a process that can use up to 380,000 barrels per well. But that’s nowhere near enough to account for all of the state’s wastewater. The rest is reinjected underground in deep rock formations, a process that can pollute aquifers, contaminate oil pools and even trigger earthquakes. A lot of the wastewater is piped and trucked over the state line to Texas, where looser regulations make it easier to dispose of, though the risks remain.
The Water, Access, Treatment and Reuse (WATR) Alliance thinks New Mexico’s answer lies in new technology and science that it contends can clean the water to the point where it can be used “without adverse impact to aquatic species, soils and plants, or human cells.” Environmental groups vehemently disagree, and say the technology isn’t ready for broad public use.
The alliance has a petition before the Water Quality Control Commission to change state rules and allow treated wastewater to be used outside the oilfield. They say the technology is ready for broad use. A previous petition from the alliance was rejected last year when it was revealed that Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham had meddled in the process. All of this follows a commission ruling last May to keep the status quo and revisit the issue in 2030.
At this point, the commission has agreed to hear the new alliance petition, but no dates for those hearings have been set. In the meantime, Matthias Sayer, vice president of the WATR Alliance, sat down with Capital & Main at the New Mexico PBS studios in Albuquerque to discuss what’s driving the petition, who’s behind the alliance and the state of wastewater science.
This interview is an excerpt of a larger transcript that can be read in its entirety at Capital & Main. It has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Capital & Main: I think a big question is why are we so concerned about this wastewater? What’s in it that has people so worried?
Matthias Sayer: Well, I think using the term “wastewater” is a good indicator of why we should be concerned when we’re talking about a waste product and then potentially recycling or reusing that waste product. Legitimate questions should be answered about what’s in the waste and what are the intended uses of that waste. And so in the context of produced water and reusing treated, produced water, there are chemical compounds in that water that we need to be worried about. And so when we have a conversation about reusing this treated wastewater, we need to be very mindful of the answers to those questions.
So what are those compounds? Your proposal before the Water Quality Control Commission notes 400-plus chemical compounds. There are pages of chemicals noted on there. Are those all of the compounds that could show up in oilfield wastewater? Are there more?
The list that you’re talking about is included in the draft rule as an appendix. That list comes from work generated from the New Mexico Produced Water Research Consortium. And that list was developed on the back of years of work and sampling of water from the Permian Basin, both the New Mexico and Texas side.
An awful lot of what we’re talking about is new technology to clean the water to make it usable. But there’s also the science aspect of it, and I think those two terms get conflated.
The gold standard of science is peer review, where you take the new technology and you offer it to third parties — not influenced by or part of the group that did the research in the first place — and you see if they can reproduce your results.
How many of the technologies from the Produced Water Research Consortium or other groups have gone through the peer review process?
It’s an important question, and my first response is to clarify a little bit when we talk about technology to treat produced water. It is not so much that there is new technology to treat this water, but it’s a combination, it’s a treatment train. It’s putting together the right treatment train, the right pieces of treatment in your train to address the chemicals that we know are in the water. And in terms of which of these treatment trains — have they been reproduced, has there been peer review analysis of the ability of these treatment trains? I don’t have a number for you to say how many replications of a particular train have been attempted or executed, but it certainly has happened.
And then there is a body of peer review literature looking at the data that came from these different treatment trains of treating this specific water because that is relevant, right? When we talk about produced water, it exists across the globe. Anytime water comes up with oil and gas production, we call that produced water, but just like water in the Pecos River as compared to water in the Susquehanna River, those water qualities are going to be very different. [In the same way], produced water from the Permian Basin is very different from produced water in the Marcellus Basin in Pennsylvania.
Last year I talked with Dr. Pei Xu, a scientist at New Mexico State University and a lead scientist on a lot of this work. She refers to it as science and she said, “If everybody looks for the peer reviewed publications, I think we still need some time, especially related to all these ongoing studies.”
So wouldn’t slowing this process down a bit give time for peer reviewed work to come in? You could say, “Look, we’ve done the work, we’ve got these new trains. The trains check out. Not only do they check out, we have third parties that say these new trains check out.” Wouldn’t that get rid of a lot of the issues you’re bumping into at this point in the public sphere?
I think there’s two answers to that question, or at least two ways to examine the question. First, if you spend a lot of time with Dr. Xu and her team, what becomes very clear is that the state of the science, the body of research examining the data that’s been produced is conclusive: We can do this in ways that are protective of human health in the environment today.
She did say that. I agree.
And so what we think is appropriate is a hearing, and through the course of that hearing, put all of this body of research in front of them and show how that science supports the framework that’s been proposed in the draft rule. Ultimately, it’s not my opinion, your opinion or even Dr. Xu’s opinion that matters. It’ll be the commission reviewing the testimony from the experts to say, you know what? We think based on the state of the science as of today that X is appropriate, maybe not X plus Y, maybe it’s just X. Maybe it is X plus Y, but it’s a decision for the commission to make.
But that’s still not quite the idea that you give it to a third party to check it out, check your work, check their math. And I still don’t see why you wouldn’t let that process play out.
I’ll tack something onto this as well, and it’s the way the Methane Waste Rule was brought up for oil and gas production. That came about because the state brought together players from oil and gas, brought together environmental groups, brought together citizen groups, and everybody sat down in several rooms over a long period of time and they hammered it all out in advance before rulemaking.
Why don’t we wait for that science to be done or why didn’t we start with a process where you bring everybody together first and figure out where the problems are and then hammer it out from there?
I think it’s a good comparison, but I think there’s an important distinction here in terms of what we’re talking about, and this is when I mentioned there’s two different ways to look at that question. The first is what I said earlier. The second is a conversation about social license and negotiating social license. And I think when you think about and talk about the Methane Advisory Group, that really was a negotiation of social license between the different stakeholders.
Instead of asking for all of these possible usespossibilities for treated produced water, why not just say: industry. And then come back later and look at it for agricultural or other uses. Why not start with glass production, cement work, chip manufacturing, AI data centers?
That’s a really good question and a really good point. The quickest answer to your question is because the science says that we can do more now.
Right now … we’d like to put the full body [of options] in front of the commission and let them decide what they think is appropriate.
