Last January, Penny Aucoin had barely been asleep for two hours when, at two thirty in the morning, she was awakened by her dog barking. As she tried to calm him down, she heard a loud pop followed by a whoosh. She and her husband, Dee George, rushed outside to see what had happened and were immediately showered with fluids that burned their eyes and smelled like fuel. While George called 911, Aucoin ran around the yard gathering up the family’s chickens.

It was an hour before the oilfield technicians arrived to shut off the leak near their home in Carlsbad, New Mexico. By then, the family’s home and yard were coated with an oily residue, and the couple were soaked through. It turned out that a pipeline about 100 feet from their home containing produced water had burst—“produced water” being the petroleum industry’s euphemism for the toxic mix of oil, gas, and chemicals that is a byproduct of fossil fuel drilling. A firefighter told them that they didn’t need to evacuate. “He said it’s flammable but not explosive,” George recalled. The next morning, Aucoin joked, “if anybody came near me with a match, I’d probably have gone poof!”

Aucoin’s grim humor has been honed over the past decade as she and George have watched oil industry infrastructure spread across the flatlands outside Carlsbad. When George, a 55-year-old navy vet and special education teacher, was growing up in the 1970s, the area was mostly farmland, and he remembers playing in the fields and irrigation ditches. Aucoin moved there a decade ago, and she recalls the place as peaceful then, with birds roosting in the mulberry trees in the evenings. Today, the landscape is dotted with well pads and pipelines. The area has “the stink of sulfur,” George said, and “brown, nasty” air shades the horizon. 

“We’ve had things go really haywire out here,” George said. The videos on his phone are a scroll of life surrounded by oilfields: a gas flare roaring like a jet engine, huge tanks of oil and gas “screaming” under high pressure, exploded equipment leading to raw gas seeping into their house. From the couple’s driveway, one can count at least 10 oil and gas production sites and, at times, the flares they produce, their bright-orange flames wavering in the breeze. 

Aucoin and George’s home is located on the western edge of the Permian Basin, the 86,000-square-mile geologic formation beneath New Mexico and West Texas that has, in the past decade, made the region the number one oil producer in North America owing to advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. In recent years, Carlsbad and surrounding Eddy County—one of the top 10 oil-producing counties in the United States—felt like a boomtown. Hotels and restaurants were packed, local businesses struggled to find workers amid full employment, and traffic jams became an unprecedented annoyance. By 2020, some 40,000 oil wells pockmarked the New Mexico Permian.

The collapse in oil demand during the pandemic walloped the Permian just as it did other oil-producing regions. Between February and June, the number of active oil wells across New Mexico plummeted by 50 percent, and more than 4,000 oil and gas workers filed for unemployment. But the pause is unlikely to last. While the oil majors make a retreat from other petroleum plays, they are concentrating their investments in the Permian Basin. The most heavily capitalized companies—giants like Chevron and Exxon­Mobil—plan to increase production in the Permian in the coming years as they buy up or edge out smaller oil companies. 

Even as global oil begins its inexorable decline, the Permian play is expected to persist as a focus of investment for years to come. For Aucoin and George, that means there is no end in sight to their life amid the oil wells. 

With wells idled and skeleton crews manning drilling sites, Aucoin said, she and her family are “hypervigilant.” And once the current downturn ends, Aucoin predicted, “they’re gonna come right back—because the oil is here.” 

LONG BEFORE THE PIPE BURST outside his family’s home, George had thought, “This isn’t right.” For years, he and Aucoin had been watching the wells and flares multiply around their property. Over time, they began to experience allergy-like symptoms such as runny noses and headaches, perhaps as a result of exposure to the highly toxic volatile organic compounds, like benzene and toluene, that were being released into the air. When George was diagnosed with a benign throat tumor, doctors told him that the growth was consistent with “chronic pollution.”

George met Aucoin, now 50, when she was working as a bus driver, and the two bonded over having children with special needs. They blended their families when they moved to the three-bedroom trailer home on George’s family property, just beyond the Carlsbad city limits. As the industrial encroachment became too much to bear, they decided to get involved in grassroots advocacy efforts to hold the oil and gas industry accountable for its impacts. “I’m trying to make people more aware of the costs of all of this,” George said, “because they don’t know.” 

He contacted the environmental organization Earthworks, and with its assistance he got to see what the wells were emitting. Methane—a.k.a. natural gas—is invisible. But Earthworks has optical-gas-imaging cameras that reveal gas plumes, and members of its team regularly visit Carlsbad to film and document emissions in the area. 

On an overcast morning last spring, Earthworks’s Sharon Wilson hauled her camera out of her SUV and set it up next to a complex of two-story tanks near George and Aucoin’s home. A fifth-generation Texan with a matching drawl, Wilson slowly panned the camera across the top of the tanks. To the naked eye, the air above the tanks appeared clear. The grainy black-and-white images on the screen showed something else: plumes of gas rising out of the tanks like drifting smoke. 

Permian oil contains a lot of gas, Wilson explained, which isn’t valuable to producers. “They would rather just let it blow out into the air,” she said. A 2019 study by scientists from the Environmental Defense Fund and Harvard University found that Permian oil and gas producers were venting and flaring methane at the record-breaking rate of 3.7 percent of gas produced, more than double the previous calculation. Wilson calls it “emissions by design.” 

Aucoin and George got involved with a local community group supported by Earthworks and New Mexico Interfaith Power and Light called Citizens Caring for the Future, which seeks to address the public health dangers posed by oil and gas drilling. One of the organizers, pastor David Rogers, is committed to calling out what he sees as the “violent hostility” of some community members to criticisms of the industry. “We want to know what’s happening” to the environment, he said. 

At a spring meeting of Citizens Caring for the Future, among the new attendees were Trey Groesbeck, his young son, and his fiancée. Groesbeck, 33, grew up in southeastern New Mexico “making mud pies out of oil and dirt.” His parents worked in the oil industry, and he remembers the volatile cycle of boom and bust. One year, Christmas came without presents, while other years the family was flush enough to buy brand-new Jet Skis and bikes. Groesbeck learned firsthand about the inherent dangers of the industry; when he was 18, his father was killed in a vehicle accident in an oilfield. But he still started a career in the oilfields after earning a degree in geology. 

Recently, however, he had a change of heart, sparked by his fiancée. He doesn’t want his kids to experience the instability he grew up with, so he is pursuing a career that he believes is more resilient: selling solar panels. “The way that I feel the world is going,” Groesbeck said, staying in the fossil fuel sector isn’t a smart career move. He’s convinced that the latest Permian Basin boom is just the last “blastoff before a large paradigm shift into renewables.” He and his family are planning to move to Colorado, where they believe there are more opportunities in renewable energy. 

THE PANDEMIC-RELATED RECESSION has revealed how vulnerable an oil-industry-dependent state like New Mexico is to the vicissitudes of the market: In boom times, communities are at risk from the operations of the fossil fuel industry, and when a bust occurs, they remain at risk. In a downturn, Earthworks’s Wilson warned, “the first thing to go are environmental concerns and the people who do safety.” Earthworks and other environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, have long advocated for a “managed decline” of the industry that would allow oil companies and governments to address long-term safety concerns while giving oil workers time to transition to new jobs. Wilson describes the situation today as a “chaotic decline” that comes with its own issues. 

One of those is the ability to safely shut down orphan wells abandoned by producers. Stephanie Garcia Richard, New Mexico’s commissioner of public lands, oversees oil and gas production on 13 million acres of state trust lands, and even before the recent crash, she was concerned that energy companies would shirk their responsibilities and criticized bonding requirements as inadequate. “I think this crisis showed us what coming up to the edge would be like,” Garcia Richard told Sierra. Oil and gas revenues constituted some 45 percent of the state budget in 2019. “Having that industry bottom out with no diversification for us to turn to, while at the same time having to bail out infrastructure, would be devastating to us.”

Thousands of wells—along with tens of thousands of miles of pipe—are at risk if companies default, she said. While drilling companies have to put up a bond of just $25,000 per lease on state trust lands, closing and remediating a single abandoned well site can cost millions. Across New Mexico, there are at least 700 orphan wells that could pose threats to the environment and human health. A University of Cincinnati study of abandoned wells in four states found that 40 percent of unplugged wells are methane emitters, and a Pennsylvania study found that even when abandoned wells are plugged with concrete, they can leak methane. 

A stark example of the oil industry’s legacy sits right at one of Carlsbad’s main intersections, where yellow road signs blare, “US 285 South Subject to Sinkhole.” It’s the state’s costliest remediation project: an abandoned brine well once used for fracking, now in danger of collapse. The prospect of the earth caving in is not an abstract concern. In 2008, two brine wells north of Carlsbad left sinkholes hundreds of feet in diameter and hundreds of feet deep. The city, county, and state governments have already spent $30 million trying to stabilize the site on US 285, and they estimate that they need millions of dollars more to complete the safety project. 

Aucoin and George can relate. In late spring, the two were still waiting for an oil company to resolve the contamination of their home caused by the January pipe break. They had put down their chickens after being advised that the meat and eggs weren’t safe to eat, and they had euthanized one of their family dogs after he’d become ill. The county agriculture extension service had advised them not to plant anything in the ground, so they started a crop of tomatoes in raised beds.

They want to move away, but they’re not sure when they will be able to. “We’re just kind of stuck,” Aucoin said with a chuckle, still trying to laugh. 

 This article appeared in the September/October 2020 edition with the headline "A Long Sunset."