'A Beautiful River in the Middle of a Hellscape': New Mexico's Pecos at Breaking Point

It is an early May afternoon in southern New Mexico, and Charlie Barrett has parked his pickup a few hundred feet from the Black River, a mile from where it empties into the Pecos. He is here to point a thermal camera at a nearby oil and gas operation, checking for emissions invisible to the naked eye. But before he even sets up, he finds something else: a muddy pullout dotted with puddles — strange during an ongoing drought — and a gray chunk of salt the size of a medicine ball sitting near a puddle flecked with shimmering white crystals.

To Barrett, a thermographer with the industry watchdog Oilfield Witness, the scene is grimly familiar. Someone, he believes, has dumped oilfield wastewater — known as produced water — at the roadside. The extremely saline, toxic byproduct of oil and gas production carries petroleum compounds and oilfield chemicals, and it can be radioactive. His worry is immediate and human: people could unwittingly drive through the muck, or pull off the road and walk through it.

Sitting later on a boulder beside a quiet bend of the Pecos — the river gurgling, dragonflies hovering, oilfield trucks rumbling over a nearby bridge — Barrett sums up the contradiction at the heart of one of America's most productive fossil-fuel regions: "It sucks. It's a beautiful river in the middle of a hellscape."

The water nobody wants

Produced water is the oil industry's unwanted shadow. For every barrel of oil extracted in New Mexico, more than three barrels of wastewater come out of the ground on average — and that ratio climbs as wells and oilfields age, a process the industry calls "watering out." As fossil-fuel production has skyrocketed in the Permian Basin, the volume of produced water has followed.

State rules ban using produced water for anything outside the oilfield, which has created a parallel industry devoted to gathering it, trucking it and reinjecting it deep underground. All day, every day, hundreds of semi trucks haul the toxic water from well sites to disposal stations along the highways and backroads of this corner of New Mexico. The reinjection itself has consequences: a rise in seismic activity across the region, and dramatic blowouts that spew toxic water when injection wells fail.

Through his camera's viewfinder, Barrett documented another violation the same afternoon: three active gas flares near a house, with a fourth visible in the footage later — methane, carbon dioxide and volatile organic compounds blowing toward someone's home. This despite New Mexico having banned nearly all flaring since 2022. Companies flare gas for a handful of reasons — off-spec gas, over-pressurised pipelines, equipment maintenance — and while burning is better for the climate than venting raw gas, it still pumps carbon dioxide and toxic pollutants into the air.

A river running dry in an oilfield

The Pecos River is one of the great rivers of the American West — a favourite of cartoon outlaws and the historic demarcation line of the Wild West, rising in some of New Mexico's highest mountains east of Santa Fe and running more than 500 miles south into Texas. Its headwaters rush through steep canyons and pine-covered slopes, earning a National Wild and Scenic River designation; its waters nourish farms and ranches across central New Mexico.

But where it exits the state, the Pecos looks less like a river than a tightly managed creek — a conveyance delivering carefully tallied water through the middle of the Permian Basin, the country's most productive oil and gas region, spanning some 75,000 square miles across 55 counties in New Mexico and Texas.

The river needs more water, and the data is stark. U.S. Geological Survey records going back nearly 40 years show the annual snowpack slowly but steadily declining in the mountains around the Pecos headwaters. Flow measurements in the upriver town of Pecos show the same decline. Last winter's snowpack collapse — which Hannah Riseley-White, director of the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission, describes as beyond anything officials could have imagined — only added to the pressure. She expects a 25 to 30 percent decrease in river water by 2070.

"The biggest challenge that the Pecos faces is just aridification due to climate change," Riseley-White says. And here is the bitter irony: one of the biggest drivers of that aridification sits atop the river's banks — tens of thousands of oil and gas wells, stitched together with pipelines, that have released carbon trapped tens of millions of years ago, changing the chemistry of the atmosphere and drying New Mexico.

380 wells within a half-mile

The scale of the industry's footprint along the river is difficult to overstate. Of the thousands of oil and gas wells piercing the ground in New Mexico's share of the Permian Basin, 380 sit within a half-mile of the Pecos. Another 11 injection wells — used to dispose of produced water — lie within that same stretch.

The environmental group American Rivers has twice named the Pecos one of the country's most endangered rivers: on its own in 2021, and again in 2024 alongside New Mexico's other waterways. Endangered animals live along its banks, including the dunes sagebrush lizard and the Texas hornshell mussel; the lesser prairie chicken was part of that group until the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service formally removed its protections early in 2026 despite its declining population.

The threats from Washington have multiplied this year. In early July, the Department of the Interior rolled back the definition of "harm" under endangered-species protections to mean only directly injuring or killing species — noise and habitat destruction would no longer count. Later that month, the department rescinded the blanket rule extending protections to threatened species and began weighing the economic cost of protections, including costs to oil and gas production. Barrett, who studied ecology and wildlife management and previously worked for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, warns that the oilfield's sound and light pollution drives species away from the ecosystem — a path toward extirpation, or regional extinction.

The fight over the wastewater

Perhaps the strangest turn in the Pecos story is the industry's proposal to put the produced water in the river. Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham's 50-Year Water Action Plan, which lays out how global warming will shrink New Mexico's water supplies, includes treating oilfield wastewater — the same stuff Barrett believes he found dumped at the roadside — to make it clean enough for use outside the oilfield.

"The industry's actually advocating for repurposing produced water and pumping it into this river," Barrett says. The legal push to change state rules and allow broad use of treated wastewater has so far failed — one effort ended after the governor appeared to influence a rulemaking body's deliberations, and another is underway with no deadlines set. Environmental groups strongly oppose the idea, arguing it is impossible to be fully certain all toxic chemicals can be removed. Across the border, the Texas Sierra Club has tallied five proposals to discharge treated produced water into the Texas portion of the Pecos watershed, none yet approved.

Riseley-White is cautiously open-minded: treated produced water will not solve all of the Pecos's problems, she says, but as one tool among many it deserves consideration. The technology exists to clean water to various standards, she notes — the question is whether the financial incentives are there.

Hope at the table

Despite everything — the drying headwaters, the dumped wastewater, the flares, the 380 wells within a half-mile of the river — Riseley-White remains optimistic. Her hope for the Pecos is that all the competing interests can be brought to the same table to find solutions that work for everyone: the farms and ranches, the oil industry, the endangered species, and the river itself.

There are small reasons for that optimism. Working with the Texas hornshell mussel on a Pecos tributary, landowners came to recognise that water in the Black River for the mussel meant water there for them too — a rare alignment of conservation and self-interest. "I think it's challenging," Riseley-White says, "but I think it's definitely possible."

For now, though, Barrett's description stands as the river's epitaph-in-progress: a beautiful river, running through the middle of a hellscape — and running lower every year.