On a hot, dusty day in August last year, a group of regulators from the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) and the Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources Department traveled to Counselor, New Mexico, to tour the oil and gas sites that dot the landscape of the Greater Chaco region.
The group included NMED’s Air Quality Bureau chief Elizabeth Bisbey-Kuehn, Environmental Protection Division Director Sandra Ely, NMED Secretary James Kenney, and EMNRD Secretary Sarah Cottrell Propst—all key regulatory figures in the state’s Methane Advisory Panel, tasked with developing new regulations around oil and gas emissions.
Teresa Seamster, Navajo Nation Counselor Chapter Health Committee member, used the opportunity to present the findings of a recently completed health impact assessment (HIA), which found periodic spikes of formaldehyde and other pollutants associated with oil and gas development recorded at unsafe levels for short periods of time near homes.
“Formaldehyde is probably one of the most carcinogenic chemicals in air that you can have,” Seamster told NM Political Report. “It will cause irritation of the respiratory tract; it can lead to throat and nose cancer, chronic respiratory inflammation, and bronchitis. It’s definitely something you do not want in the environment, and we were getting it in the open air at levels that require mitigation.”
“Formaldehyde was detected at all sites at unhealthy levels,” she added.
Seamster and other volunteers from the chapter conducted the study under the guidance of the Environmental Health Project (EHP), a nonprofit public health organization that conducts scientific air quality monitoring for communities near oil and gas development. The report is currently unpublished—and will likely remain so until the COVID-19 pandemic subsides and the Navajo Nation government is able to reopen—but NM Political Report obtained a copy.
It’s also the latest in a growing body of evidence, codified into multiple peer-reviewed studies conducted across the country, that indicates communities situated near oil and gas development are exposed to hazardous pollution at higher levels than either state or federal regulatory agencies recognize.
Studies Point to Hidden Exposures
Residents living among oil and gas development areas across the United States, including New Mexico’s two energy-producing areas of the state, have complained for years about symptoms that they say are caused by nearby oil and gas activity. Those symptoms include nosebleeds, headaches, upper respiratory issues, asthma, migraines, and throat and nose cancer.
The HIA report findings point to a likely culprit: short-term, intense bursts of elevated levels of chemicals such as formaldehyde, chloromethane, methylene chloride, and chloroethylene that exceed state and federal standards, along with high levels of particulate matter.
In 2014, David Carpenter, a professor of Public Health at the State University of New York at Albany, led a peer-reviewed study that took air samples from communities located near oil and gas activity across five states. The results were similar to those reported in the Counselor chapter HIA report.
“We found that 40% of the samples taken in these five states grossly exceeded federal standards,” he said, for exposure to benzene, formaldehyde, and other chemicals associated with oil and gas production. “One of our samples had 10,000 times over the EPA standard.”
Those results have been replicated by diverse groups studying air quality in oil and gas communities across the country, pointing to a dangerous gap in federal and state monitoring systems.
These studies also point to the universality of hidden emissions among oil and gas communities.
“We see it everywhere we look,” said Celia Lewis, the research and communications specialist at EHP. “Older wells might have leaks, but even new wells have venting and fugitive emissions. There are so many valves and joins and sources of emissions on a well pad or a compressor station pad. There’s plenty of opportunity.”
That means there’s a good chance communities living in the Permian Basin are also being exposed to dangerous levels of these pollutants, Lewis said.
No state or federal air monitors are picking up those exposures.