“EAT USA BEEF DRILL USA OIL.” So said the sign, in red and blue lettering against a white background, along a La Plata County road I took on a little trip down to northwestern New Mexico last week. It must have had some effect on me. Because after taking a run through the coalbed methane fields, I headed straight to Blake’s Lotaburger in Aztec and partook in the goods, replete with green chile, of course.
When I was a kid, my family used to come to Aztec every so often, especially in the spring and fall, when it was too cold and muddy to do outside stuff in Durango. We’d visit Aztec Ruins National Monument and walk through the ancient houses. My favorite part was pressing the button in the rebuilt great kiva that triggered the muffled recording of drumming and singing. Then we went to A&W and got lunch and ate it in the park with the rocket slide, which was the coolest thing ever.
That was in the 1970s, when Aztec and Farmington and the rest of the region were overflowing with oil and gas workers tasked with solving the multiple energy crises triggered by unrest in the Middle East. They were supplemented by the workers at the new mines and coal plants out toward Shiprock, the giant smokestacks sullying the once clean air with unmitigated sulfurous black smoke.
It was the third and probably biggest fossil fuel boom the region had seen so far, but the place was still unprepared to handle it. More orchards and farmland were scraped clean to make way for trailer parks or tract housing. The cops were overwhelmed by the rise in crime and violence that accompanied the incoming flood of transient workers. Classrooms were packed to the brim, forcing some schools to have two shifts a day. A long-running undercurrent of bigotry intensified, and 50 years ago this month a trio of white kids beat, tortured, and murdered three Diné men, ultimately triggering an investigation by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. “We didn’t see the murders as the act of three crazy kids,” longtime Diné community organizer John Redhouse told an interviewer in 1974. “We saw it as part of a whole racist picture.”
I don’t know if the pre-teen me sensed that any of this was happening, or even if I knew what an oil and gas boom was. To me, Aztec was the place with the rocket-ship slide and Farmington had a wider array of chain stores and fast food joints than little Durango, a place you’d go to see a movie while your friend’s mom went bargain-hunting. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s, when I was a teenager driving around gas patch roads with friends, that I marveled at the glow of the methane flares flickering in the night and casting eerie shadows across the sandstone cliffs.
Now Aztec feels like a place on the brink of something, though I don’t know what that something is, exactly. The town’s core has good bones, as they say, that managed to maintain their integrity throughout multiple resource extraction booms and busts. The small, historic residential area is shaded by mature trees. A dozen or so commercial buildings on the main drag, constructed in the early 1900s, still stand, lending charm to the downtown. Yet many of the storefronts are empty and Main Avenue doubles as a state highway that sees a constant stream of gas-field trucks and Albuquerque-bound traffic.
But that’s about to change. The city is finally building a bypass designed to accommodate all of that through-traffic. When it’s complete, it will allow the city to overhaul the downtown, making it more people, pedestrian, and business-friendly, just as Farmington — Aztec’s big-sister city — has done, to positive effect.
I’ve long predicted that Aztec would one day draw folks seeking refuge from high housing prices in Durango, about 45 miles north. This could play out in various ways. On the one hand, Aztec’s relative affordability should attract entrepreneurs of the kind that might establish viable businesses downtown, lending vitality and self-sufficiency to the community. But the same affordability can become an amenity that makes the town more desirable and drives up housing prices. If this happens too quickly, it will price out the aforementioned, hypothetical entrepreneurs.
Maybe it already happened. A glance at Zillow reveals there are no houses for sale at all in the most desirable neighborhood, and that most of those on the market elsewhere are $300,000 or more. That’s far less expensive than Durango, but still out of reach for most working people, and for someone hoping to start their own business.
Sometimes it feels as if the economic exiles have nowhere left to go — at least in the Western U.S.
I finished my Lotaburger and headed south, passing by the site of the San Juan Basin’s first commercial natural gas well, drilled back in 1921, and continued toward Farmington on a county road that runs parallel to and east of the Animas River. Like much of San Juan County, this part is cluttered with rural sprawl, agricultural remnants, and the detritus of the oil and gas industry. Yet the river and its flood plain open up the view, allowing one to imagine what it might have looked like a century ago: a braided river wending its way along a lush valley floor, bordered by willows and sandstone cliffs; emerald green pastures lined by towering cottonwoods; the coal locomotive pulling a string of apple-laden boxcars northward; and the orchards, oh the orchards!
In 1950, San Juan County was home to 230,000 fruit trees — 108,000 apple, 82,000 peach trees, 17,000 grape vines, and a whole bunch of pear, cherry, plum, apricot, and even pecan trees. They don’t count the trees anymore, but one does not need the agricultural census to know that only a fraction of those orchards remain. Where ripe, juicy peaches once hung heavy on the branches, now stand big box stores, massive equipment yards, house-lined cul de sacs, highways, convenience stores, and a landscape, culture, and economy shaped by, dependent upon, and seemingly inextricable from the fossil fuel industry.
Yet that relationship has grown fraught in recent years. After natural gas prices plummeted in 2009 due to a national supply glut, the big petro-corporations began pulling up stakes and abandoning the region, leaving their messes to smaller, private companies, which often lack the resources or incentive to clean them up. One of two massive coal plants and mines shut down in 2022 and the other’s days are numbered.
A lot of local officials predicted that the closure of the San Juan Generating Station would wreak economic havoc in the region due to the loss of employment and tax revenue. They were so worried about the potential impact that they threw their lot in with a company called Enchant Energy, which planned to spend $1.6 billion to retrofit the plant with carbon capture equipment just to keep the thing running. That effort collapsed, taking plenty of Farmington taxpayers’ cash down with it. And the plant closed after all. Now, the air is quite a bit cleaner. And the economy? It’s doing just fine.
Six months ago, the Land Desk reported that the energy transition was well under way in the region, and that the economy was actually improving rather than collapsing, as many predicted it would. More recent tax revenue data show the regional economy continues to hold steady, and that construction and retail trade take up an ever-expanding portion of the economy. The oil and gas industry has lost much of its share, but seems to be holding on now, probably thanks to climbing natural gas prices, which are partly the result of a huge increase in liquefied natural gas exports to Europe.
Farmington launched its “Jolt Your Journey” campaign about a decade ago to develop and highlight the region’s non-fossil-fuel amenities. At the time it seemed like some sort of joke. After all, this is a place that had an ill-fated baseball team called the Farmington Frackers; where golfers must make it past not only sand traps, but also gas wells; and where hikers would be well-advised to carry hydrogen sulfide detectors to warn them if the deadly gas is emanating from a well.
And yet, Farmington seems to be changing for the better, if a bit slowly. The Complete Streets downtown makeover seems to be bringing activity back to the community’s center, which had been eviscerated by big box sprawl. Farmington Area Single Track is living up to its name, establishing a new mountain bike trail network and a pump track near San Juan College and beyond. The city is building new parks and bike lanes. A local surge in interest in rooftop solar sparked the establishment of a local chapter of the Solar United Neighbors cooperative. And the state is finally preparing to disperse Energy Transition Act economic development grants to fund, among other projects; the Northern New Mexico Indigenous Farmers’ planned solar-powered microgrid with battery storage to provide electricity to a new irrigation pumping plant, and the City of Farmington’s solar-plus-battery storage installation.
After getting caffeinated in a downtown Farmington coffee shop, I continued my trek, heading westward into blustery and dusty weather in hopes of catching a glimpse of the San Juan Solar Project, a 200-megawatt installation under construction near the shuttered San Juan coal plant. As I turned off the extremely busy main highway to Shiprock in favor of a county road north of there, I pondered a paper I recently read about how difficult it is for fossil fuel-reliant communities like Farmington to replace jobs and tax revenue lost when the oil, gas, and coal companies bail. It takes a lot more people to pull a bunch of coal or petroleum from the earth and to burn it than it does to generate power from the sun or the wind, which means that the former brings a lot more jobs with it, along with royalty and tax revenues.
The pavement ended and I turned onto a gravel road and began to follow the signs pointing to the solar project. A black truck with Texas plates passed going the opposite direction as me, followed by another car, and then another truck, and a steady stream of vehicles kicking up dust as they headed back toward town. They were construction workers from the solar project just getting off work on a Friday afternoon — hundreds of them. I guess the energy transition can pay after all.
I pulled over to wait until the traffic and dust settled. As I sat there I looked over at the San Juan Generating Station, looming over the landscape. I’ve gazed upon that megalith many a times, but this time something was different: No smoke emanated from the towering stacks, and the air above them was clear.
Foto Friday/Mining Monitor
I went and checked out a different sort of energy transition on the edge of Green River, Utah, earlier this month. That’s where A1/Anson/Blackstone has gobbled up hundreds of mining claims and is embarking on a test well for its planned direct lithium extraction project.
Lithium is necessary to make the lithium-ion batteries that power the electric vehicles that one day may make petroleum-fueled vehicles obsolete. So it’s kind of interesting that a lithium extraction operation looks almost exactly like an oil and gas drilling operation — and uses an oil and gas rig — as you can see in the image below.
Green River often finds itself in the center of these sorts of projects. Fifteen years or so ago a developer proposed building a nuclear power plant there. But they couldn’t secure water rights for the thing. Now Western Vanadium & Uranium is looking to build a uranium mill on the town’s outskirts, even though there’s already a mill in Blanding that has plenty of room to process more of the stuff. Plus, Anfield Energy says it has applied with the state of Utah to fire up its Shootaring Mill south of the Henry Mountains, meaning there’s going to be a lot of processing capacity without much uranium to mill — at least not yet. Go figure.
When I was in Green River I woke up early and ran a lap of the Athena missile launch site trail. I had the place all to myself, which was a bit eerie (it being a missile launching place and all), but also a nice contrast to the hordes around Moab. As I neared the end of the loop I happened upon a wooden stake jutting out of the clay earth affixed with little metal plates and two plastic containers. It’s one of Anson’s many mining claims.
There’s nothing surprising about that. But still, there was something about seeing it that drove home how silly federal mining law really is. All you gotta do to stake a claim is come out here, locate it, put some sort of marker on it, report it to the local BLM office, and pay your $165 location fee. You don’t ask the BLM if you can make the claim. You tell them you’re doing it. There is no public input, no environmental review, no nothing. That doesn’t automatically entitle you to start mining; you’ve gotta get a permit for that. But still, it just seems absurd.
Parting Shot
I'm sorry for it all..it just makes me want to cry what has happened and is happening to the west.
People gotta eat. It's what we do. There are too many of us. In the end, we eat the land.