Oh Well!!! EPA Was (Possibly) Ready To Act On Permian Basin Ozone Pollution Gagging New Mexico. Not Any More!!

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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.

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https://capitalandmain.com/the-epa-stalled-and-then-a-fix-for-new-mexico-oil-and-gas-pollution-evaporated