Soon after midnight July 15, the Valencia County commissioners voted 3-2 to approve a measure that will potentially open opportunities for oil and gas exploration in the county.
As I understand what transpired during the meeting, the Republican Party chairman for Valencia County interrupted the meeting and argued participants should “support fossil fuel-based economic growth” using a microphone outside the Los Lunas Transportation Center. The developed nations of the world have been supporting fossil fuel-based economic growth for over a century, and look at where we are at today, globally and thus collectively.
I share the opinions of Don Phillips, who is quoted in the July 15 Journal article, concerning the potential of serious consequences of drilling within the Rio Grande rift and Valencia and adjacent counties. I suspect that many, if not most, geoscientists who have worked in New Mexico and know something about the Rio Grande rift would also share his opinions, which also included damage to the freshwater aquifer that we have been so dependent upon for many, many decades .
You see, the Rio Grande rift is a zone of continental crustal extension (spreading) that trends roughly north-south through New Mexico, and extends through much of Colorado and becomes part of a much broader extensional zone in southern New Mexico and northern Mexico. The Albuquerque-Belen basin is one part of the Rio Grande rift. Continental rifts are typically characterized by considerable accumulations of sediment detritus, shed from surrounding uplifts – eg, the Sandia Mountains – and they also may be associated with magmatism – eg, the Albuquerque volcanoes and many similar features. Extensive work by several research teams has shown that, in the southern Albuquerque-Belen basin, the thickness of the Rio Grande rift-related sedimentary sequence is typically about three to three and a half kilometers, and locally slightly more. Translation: One needs to drill some 10,000 to 12,000 feet before closing in on any possible hydrocarbon source rock, if it exists, below the rift sequence.
The Journal article goes on to state that Harvey E. Yates Jr., owner of the oil and gas firm Jalapeño Corp., has previously noted “there’s probably a 90% chance of failure in strikingly viable oil and gas deposits in the area. ” So, why do it?
In the July 17 New York Times Opinion Section, Professor Simon Lewis, University College London and the University of Leeds, writes about the immense dangers of potential oil and gas exploration of the “central basin” of the Republic of Congo, and states, “ if the world is to cut carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2050 and stabilize our climate, no investments in new fossil fuels should be made anywhere.”
My intent is less of a criticism of the oil and gas industry and much more a criticism of those unwilling to apply wisdom and reason to recognize and thus thwart efforts to address the root causes of the global climate catastrophe that is staring us in the face, at this very moment, and promises to get much worse over the next decades.
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