There’s not much grass on the Harvey E. Yates Co. exploratory gas well site near Alamo Mountain on Otero Mesa, just caliche-covered ground and bunches of weeds, though the site has seen little use in the decade since the well was put in.
And that, environmentalists believe, is just one of the problems with allowing more exploration and well sites on the unique, Chihuahuan Desert grasslands east-northeast of El Paso.
The fragile grasslands are home to New Mexico’s strongest and most genetically pure population of Pronghorn Antelope, the black tail prairie dog, kit fox and the endangered Aplomado falcon.
“Here, the prairie dogs weren’t poisoned out and the antelope weren’t hunted out, so you’ve a pretty much intact ecosystem that’s big enough to keep these species around,” said Kevin von Finger, who is retired, former ecologist for Fort Bliss and who now stays active with environmentally oriented organizations in El Paso.
Most importantly to some, Otero Mesa also sits over an aquifer that may hold as much as 57 million acre feet of water. That’s about 1,000 times as much as the city of El Paso uses a year.
For those reasons, the Southwest Environmental Center in Las Cruces is proposing a resolution that the El Paso City Council will consider Tuesday calling for federal legislation to permanently protect the grasslands from further oil and gas exploration. South West city Rep Beto O’Rourke will carry the resolution.
Next week, El Paso County Commissioners Court will consider the same resolution. It will be sponsored by Commissioner Luis Sariñana, who doesn’t consider himself an environmentalist.
“I hate to say it, but it’s not the beauty I’m concerned with or the wildlife that I think needs to be protected,” Sariñana said. “My angle is water, which is a precious commodity right now, and we’ve just got to conserve it.”
Sariñana toured Otero Mesa last week with Adam Guss, the regional organizer for the Southwest Environmental Center, von Finger and an El Paso Newspaper Tree reporter.
For a decade, the environmental community has been resisting the Bureau of Land Management’s plan to open Otero Mesa to oil and gas exploration and production out of concern that such activity will, over time, destroy the grassland and the wildlife habitat it provides.
What is referred to Otero Mesa – though it is not really a mesa at all – covers about 1.2 million acres of public land in New Mexico’s Otero and Sierra Counties.
BLM’s chief New Mexico Spokesman, Hans Stewart, said the unspoiled grasslands actually cover about 200,000 acres, a little more than 300 square miles, and expanses of that are protected from significant activity, including oil and gas exploration.
He said the agency, which has frozen gas exploration pending the outcome of an environmental lawsuit challenging the new rules for exploration and production, said those rules are among the most stringent to be found anywhere.
He strongly disagrees with an assertion in the proposed resolution that there have been 1,400 incidents of groundwater contamination caused by oil and gas activities in New Mexico since 1990.
“That is one of the mistakes in the resolution,” he said. “It is referring to spills of a gallon or more, most of which are very small and not on public land. That’s what the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division counted as groundwater contamination.”
The BLM, he said, has applied special protection to 121,000 acres and has four study areas totaling 45,000 acres, plus a 43,000 acres of “critical environmental concern” for black gramma grass near Alamo Mountain.
One road in to the middle of nowhere
The immense area of Otero Mesa is open for public recreational use but hasn’t seen much of it because of its isolation and inaccessibility.
From El Paso, there is one easy route in, off Hueco Ranch Road, just past the Hueco Tanks Historical Park turn-off on the Carlsbad Highway.
Ten miles of paved, two-lane road and 15 more miles on well-tended but unpaved road, and you are there, on flat prairie where, in some large sections, mesquite, creosote and cactus are largely absent.
It is covered by a sea of short and scrubby, black gramma grass that isn’t much to look at when conditions are dry, but which grows quickly and turns a lush green after a rain.
“This doesn’t have beautiful meadows and the streams, and I think a lot of people don’t understand the importance of a grassland ecosystem,” Guss said.
The steady, sometimes punishing wind that sweeps across the land is fresh and may carry the fluted call of a meadowlark, rare in these parts, or other grassland birds that, Von Finger said, are finding fewer places to call home: brewer’s sparrow, grasshopper sparrow and the Aplomado falcon.
“Most of the grassland species are going to disappear if this area is fragmented by drilling sites,” he said. “The birds require a certain minimal area – 1,000 aces or 10,000 acres of grassland per pair –that can sustain them to raise their young.
“The Aplomado falcon probably requires 5,000 to 6,000 acres for just one pair. If you’re going to have a population of 100 pairs you’re going to need a huge area.”
Though the area doesn’t meet the formal definition of a wilderness because much of it is leased to ranchers for cattle grazing, von Finger said that’s just what it is.
“It only has a few roads, and you can come out here and hike and get lost. This is a wilderness,” he said.
There are a few landmarks, such as Alamo Mountain, which rises mysteriously like a beacon that is visible for many miles in all directions. Native Americans, including the Tiguas, still consider it a holy place.
One company, two wells
Otero Mesa had been open to oil and gas lease for years, but there was little serious interest until 1997 when the Harvey E. Yates Co., known as Heyco, discovered gas, sparking a rush of lease applications.
In response to public opposition, BLM imposed a moratorium on leasing until it came up with a plan in 2000 that set 116,000 acres aside but opened more than 90 percent of Otero Mesa up for exploration under stringent terms that the Bush administration loosened somewhat in 2005.
Among other things, the standards require triple casing of drill shafts that pass through aquifer zones to protect from leaks, allow only five percent of Otero Mesa to be open to exploration at a time and mandates the full restoration of a drilling site with native grass before a company can move onto another.
Stewart said the plan restricts surface disturbance to 1,589 acres of the 2 million acres of public land, which includes the military’s McGregor Range.
“Only when lands are fully reclaimed in native vegetation would other acres be opened for development,” he said. That’s a very tight limitation.
“The irony is that prior to this planning effort that began in 1998, the whole area was open to oil and gas development.”
Guss and von Finger scoffed at the possibility of reclaiming prairie where there had been black gramma grass, saying it has never been done, despite decades of experimentation.
They point to one of two Heyco well sites in the shadow of Alamo Mountain. The five-acre pad is a decade old, still covered with caliche and gravel and a variety of weedy clumps of vegetation.
“I can’t believe the BLM actually believes this could be restored,” von Finger said as he surveyed the well site. “It’s been scraped to make it a level pad, which is what they do everywhere.
“It’s just a big mess, and they’ll have one over there and over there and over there, as far as the eye can see. So, the unbroken grassland, which is so important to there being a grassland, will go and the wildlife will disappear.”
Guss said Otero Mesa is not in imminent danger but the privately funded Southwest Environmental Center is intent on keeping the issue of its preservation before the public and before Congress.
“It’s not like they’re going to start drilling in the next month or two,” he said. “But the purpose of our organization is to build support and awareness around this and to give us more ammunition to go and talk to Congress (Silvestre) Reyes about legislation to permanently protect Otero Mesa.”
David Crowder can be reached at dcrowder@epmediagroup.com
