Danny Garcia knows a lot about water security in Northern New Mexico. In his role as chairman of the Cabresto Lake Irrigation Community Ditch Association, Garcia is responsible for managing water rights and maintaining communal irrigation ditches in the area.
“My responsibility is to get as many people in our association their allotted water,” he said. “The Association has a priority date of 1815, even before New Mexico was a state.”
Garcia has been chairman of the ditch association since 2013. He’s also part of the Questa Watershed Protectors, a group of local citizens opposed to a planned hydrogen power plant in Questa – potentially the first of its kind in the state. The group is concerned about the fast-tracked environmental review for the project and the combustibility of hydrogen. But their biggest concern remains the amount of water the plant could use and if that usage will affect local wells and municipal water supplies.
While being interviewed for this story, Garcia received a poignant phone call.
“The water is slowing down,” said a faint voice on the other end of the line. A manager from the ditch association was having issues delivering enough water to a landowner. While New Mexico saw record-low snowpack last winter, Garcia said the problem isn’t new.
“The last five years I've noticed the stream flow has really diminished,” he said. “There's not that much water in the stream on Cabresto Creek.”
The proposed hydrogen facility would use a process known as electrolysis to separate hydrogen from water. Hydrogen burns clean and can also be stored for use when solar and other renewables are not online. Kit Carson Electric Cooperative plans to build the facility at the Chevron mine tailings site on the edge of Questa. Tailings refers to leftover waste from mining. Because tailings can be toxic, the location is a Superfund site, meaning it has undergone long term environmental cleanup and monitoring from the Environmental Protection Agency. The water for hydrogen production would be sourced from a well at the Chevron tailings site.
Garcia also referenced the Sunshine Valley Hydrology study which was published in 2019 by the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources. The study found that the area has lost between 1,000 and 3,000 acre-feet of groundwater every year since the 1980s.
But Kit Carson says that it’s taking those concerns into consideration.
“We don’t want to harm the aquifer, but I think for this project and all the benefits, this is a good use of water,” said Kit Carson CEO Luis Reyes.
Reyes said Kit Carson is mindful of the potential risks involved with this project. That’s why the utility commissioned Glorieta Geoscience to conduct a groundwater evaluation.
The study found that most nearby wells are much shallower than the proposed hydrogen production well. That means that the production well draws water from what the study calls, “a different hydrogeologic unit.” The study also claims that underground layers of clay might isolate the production well from other nearby groundwater zones.
Reyes said the site’s history as a tailings site also makes it a good candidate for an energy facility.
“This was a Superfund site that had been contaminated,” he said. “There was no other use for it.”
Reyes also noted that planning for the hydrogen facility started in 2021 and the federal grant secured to fund the plant can only be used for hydrogen energy. As for the benefits that Reyes mentioned, he said the hydrogen facility can provide renewable energy when solar is unavailable. That will allow Kit Carson to reach its goal of having 24/7 renewable energy. There’s also a safety benefit — during extreme fire conditions, Kit Carson could shut down high-risk transmission lines while the hydrogen facility keeps the power on locally.
Reyes and I met up with Questa local and Kit Carson Board President Bobby Ortega and drove to the proposed hydrogen facility site. As we approached the site, Ortega pointed out his father’s homestead and land that he farms right next to the tailings site. Ortega is the uncle of Questa mayor and Kit Carson safety director John Ortega. John Ortega’s dual roles have also raised claims of a conflict of interest.
As we stood at the site, Ortega pointed out the wells that the Village of Questa draws its water from and the Chevron well that will be used for hydrogen production. The distance between them is about two miles. Ortega mentioned maps provided by the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer that show separate aquifers under the wells.
I wondered how these wells, both of which I could see from the edge of the proposed hydrogen facility site, could pull water from separate sources. Later that day, when I met with Garcia, he told me he knows people from all over the area who are dealing with dried up or less productive wells.
“If they're claiming that it's different aquifers, I'm claiming both aquifers are getting drained,” he said.
Before reporting this story, if I closed my eyes and imagined an aquifer, I thought of a massive underground lake. Stacy Timmons, Associate Director of Hydrogeology for the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources, said that is true in areas with a lot of limestone.
“But the majority of the groundwater in New Mexico — and also in the world — is actually water that is found within the rocks,” she said. “So, it's water in between grains of sand, gravel and clay, or water in fractures within sandstones or very hard granites.”
Those are the types of geologic features that hold the groundwater underneath the Questa area, not a large underground pool.
Timmons is not involved with the hydrogen project or the study that Kit Carson Electric commissioned. Her office does a lot of work mapping aquifers and looking at the state’s groundwater holistically.
Timmons provided geologic cross sections that show the Village of Questa municipal wells are shallower than the Chevron well and located in different geologic deposits. They’re also closer to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains than the Chevron well. Timmons said that likely puts them in a better position to soak up any rain or snow melt that runs off the mountains. In theory, as water runs down the mountains, it should saturate the aquifer that the municipal wells draw from before it runs downhill towards the Chevron well and into the Rio Grande.
But, with her holistic view of things, Timmons said aquifer recharge is nuanced. She said in some areas of the state there is active aquifer recharge while in other areas there is very little recharge or none at all.
“In New Mexico, we don't likely have enough water for all of the things that we wish to do,” she said. "We are, in many areas, using water in an unsustainable way, and so we have to make these hard choices.”
A Kit Carson Electric report from November said the plant’s electrolyzer could use around 100 acre-feet of water per year. Reyes said the actual usage will probably be 47 acre-feet annually. For context, the biggest source of water use in New Mexico is agricultural irrigation. A 2020 report said that Taos County, where the proposed plant is located, uses almost 4,000 acre-feet of water of groundwater a year for agricultural irrigation. That’s about 40 times the maximum amount the hydrogen facility plans to use. And when it comes to surface water, agricultural irrigation uses even more water. In 2020, Taos County used over 65,000 acre-feet of surface water for agricultural irrigation. Looking at surface water and groundwater together, irrigation uses almost 700 times as much water as the hydrogen facility projections.
Timmons said that groundwater levels in the Chevron well appear to be stable. That may be because the well was previously used for dust mitigation at the Superfund site and has been unused in recent years. But, Timmons said, just because the well is producing water now, that doesn’t mean it always will be.
“If this is something that moves forward, there has to be a monitoring requirement,” she said.
Timmons hopes that projects like the proposed hydrogen facility in Questa will encourage New Mexicans to get curious about where their water comes from.
“Do this deep dive and try to learn about the geology and where your wells are,” she said. “In New Mexico, it's far more complicated than what it seems to be on the surface.”
