It was bitingly cold as legislators, staff, lobbyists and others rolled into New Mexico’s capitol building, the Roundhouse, in Santa Fe on Jan. 26. The annual session had begun six days earlier — a short, one-month session dedicated almost exclusively to the state budget.
A cold front had blown off the North Pole and swooped down through Canada and the central U.S., dragging record cold temperatures behind it. In Santa Fe, which sits at 7,000 feet, temperatures dipped to the single digits overnight that Sunday and Monday — pretty cold, but not unusual for the capital in January. However around Carlsbad, New Mexico, 250 miles farther south and nearly 4,000 feet lower, it was even colder, with three nights dropping below zero. Sitting in the middle of the broad, flat Permian Basin that stretches across southeast New Mexico and into Texas, the city can normally count on much warmer temperatures than most other corners of the state. But not this last week of January.
The basin is the most productive oilfield in the nation, with tens of thousands of oil and gas wells and related infrastructure just in New Mexico’s section of the Permian. And when the temperatures there plunged, oil and gas infrastructure began flaring and venting unusually large amounts of natural gas.
