New Mexico’s land commissioner says Texas property owners are swiping millions of gallons of water from his state and reselling it back for fracking at big profits.
"Texas is stealing New Mexico’s water. If you put a whole bunch of straws in Texas and you don’t have any straws in New Mexico, you’re sucking all the water from under New Mexico out in Texas and then selling it back to New Mexico," Aubrey Dunn told The Texas Tribune.
"You're taking a resource that's not really rechargeable, and using it. I think in the long run water is going to be more valuable than oil.”
Uneven state laws allow Texans to pump as much water from beneath their land as they want, while in New Mexico, rigid rules restrict supplies of surface and groundwater.
And with fracking operations requiring enormous quantities of water, Texas landowners are helping out and cashing in.
But Dunn told The Tribune that the unregulated pumping from wells by the state line is depleting aquifers that supply water to southern New Mexico.
In fracking, rock is drilled and shot with high pressure water to obtain natural gas, petroleum, and brine.
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