A trip through a sacrifice zone
In northwest New Mexico, hundreds of wells are in limbo

It’s mid-June and Don Schreiber is holding court behind the wheel of his ranch truck as he pilots it along a county road west of Farmington. Schreiber is a talker but comes up short of words as he tries to describe the grandeur and beauty of the place we’re headed, a sort of plateau from which one can see the ominous form of Tsé Bit’a’í, or Shiprock, the backside of Mesa Verde and the Carrizo Mountains. “It’s like … kinda like a cathedral,” he says. 

Then we’re all left speechless as we come over a rise and our vision is filled with the hulking shape of the San Juan Generating Station and its four smokestacks. Schreiber steers onto a gravel road in front of the coal-burning power plant and heads westward, climbing up and through one of the sandstone ridges that makes up the Hogback, a geological formation that marks the boundary of the San Juan Basin. From up here it does, indeed, feel like a sacred place, albeit one despoiled by pumpjacks, well pads, rusty pipes, pvc tubing and other industrial detritus. 

“It’s like someone went into a church and vandalized it,” Schreiber says, finding the words easily – and emphatically – this time. 

Schreiber – along with Robyn Jackson, interim executive director of Diné CARE, and David Fosdeck, a Farmington solar advocate, ditch rider and surveyor – are taking me on a tour of the Horseshoe Gallup oil and gas field. The field epitomizes one of the vexing problems facing advocates and regulators: How to tap federal funds for abandoned and orphaned well cleanups when the wells in question are in a state of limbo. Schreiber calls it the “orphaned/non-orphaned well syndrome.” That is, the wells are defunct and their operators bankrupt – but regulators still consider the facilities to be active, indefinitely delaying cleanup. 

Schreiber stops the truck, and we climb out to inspect an iron post indicating where a well had long ago been plugged and abandoned. He is a wiry guy, his mustachioed face shaded by a white cowboy hat. The silver buckle on the belt holding up his Wranglers is inlaid with turquoise-like stones that spell “Schreiber Insurance,” the business he ran for years. In the late 1990s, he retired, and he and his wife, Jane, bought the Devils Spring Ranch, east of Farmington, where they intended to run a holistic, sustainable ranching operation.

Plans were interrupted, however, by the drilling frenzy on and around the ranch during the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney administration, and Schreiber slid into a new role as one of the region’s most persistent and outspoken oil and gas watchdogs. Which is why, several months ago, an official in Washington, D.C., contacted him, looking for orphaned or abandoned wells that might be eligible for part of the $4.7 billion in cleanup funds in last year’s congressional infrastructure bill. 

You’d think finding it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Some 40,000 wells have been drilled during the past century in the San Juan Basin – a 10,000-square-mile geological dish rife with hydrocarbons laid down during the Cretaceous era. And more than 100 wells pockmark Schreiber’s ranch and surrounding lands. But to Schreiber’s chagrin, he could not come up with any that fit the bill. When he asked around, a friend who runs a local well service business pointed him toward the Horseshoe Gallup, a collection of some 800 wells that sits a distance from major throughways in an area of overlapping jurisdictions.

That Schreiber had forgotten about the field was a bit embarrassing. He grew up in northwestern New Mexico, after all, and was a child when Farmington was transforming from an agricultural center into an oil, gas and coal hotspot. He remembers the smell of burning orchards that had been cleared to make way for oilfield worker housing. “I have such a clear image of the mounded trees and the smoke,” he says. “They were building Apple Valley subdivision.” 

Companies had been drilling for oil and gas here since the 1920s, but El Paso Natural Gas’ 1950 construction of a pipeline to carry San Juan Basin methane to California sparked the transformative boom. The flames were fanned by a flurry of oil finds in 1956-57, including the Horseshoe Gallup, where Arizona Exploration drilled the Horseshoe Canyon B#1 well, which had an initial production rate of 120 barrels per day, according to local historian Tom Dugan. 

Fosdeck directs Schreiber to turn down a dusty two-track, and we pull up near a tank smeared with an almost artistic rusty patina. This well originally was drilled by Standard Oil Co. of Texas in 1960, during the Horseshoe Gallup’s initial boom. Standard’s drill made it down 1,735 feet, but the hole was dry, so workers plugged what was called the Navajo 82-1-1 well and moved on. Two decades later, Raymond E. Sitta, Jr. took over the lease and applied for a permit to “move in cable tools, clean out cement plugs and open hole to 1735 and test for oil production.” When oil came bubbling out, he named it State Senate #2, most likely for his father, who was a New Mexico state senator up until his death in 1979.

Even from a distance, it’s clear that State Senate #2’s glory days are behind it. The relatively diminutive blue and yellow pumpjack is motionless, and tumbleweeds have gathered around the once-moving parts. An old garden hose that probably carried well gas or methane from the well to the pumpjack’s engine has rotted away. Indeed, the “poppin’ Jonny,” as the well-gas-powered engines are known, is long gone. According to state records, the well last produced oil semi-regularly in 2007, and even then, it was only at a rate of about 25 to 50 barrels per year – not exactly a cash cow. 

Sitta died in 2008 and, in 2011, his estate sold the State Senate #2, along with other wells in the field, to BIYA (which supposedly stands for “Boot in Your Ass”), which at the time was registered in Aztec under Richard and Debbie Baldwin. They tried to revive the old well, coaxing a whopping six barrels of oil from the ground in 2012. It hasn’t produced anything worth recording since, even though another obscure company, Diversified Resources, purchased BIYA and its wells in 2014.

It seemed as if Schreiber had found at least one well for his contact in D.C. Or maybe not. When Schreiber and company went to check the state oil conservation division’s records, they were astonished to find that the State Senate #2 is an “active” well. The Bureau of Land Management classifies it as “shut-in,” which supposedly means that it’s temporarily idled, and the operator plans to bring it back into production soon. It also means the operator doesn’t have to plug the well, clean up the site or give up whatever bond or financial assurance it may have posted.