Fracking Coming to the El Paso Region?

Just 64 miles from El Paso on the Diablo Plateau atop the Salt Basin Aquifer is Cornudas, TX - a place of us zoom by on our way to the Guadalupe Mountains National Park or Carlsbad Caverns. Now if we were to stop there, turnaround, drive back toward El Paso and then a bit south, we would be in an area that Torchlight Energy Resources plans to drill for oil. The company is expected to drill a test well before the year is over and then ultimately 2,500 wells. The euphemism they use: "horizontal drilling techniques". Read FRACKING. Torchlight believes that the Diablo Plateau atop the Salt Basin Aquifer less than an hour from El Paso will prove to be another Midland/Odessa.

The Hudspeth County Herald edited by Andrew Stuart broke the story in August. Read about it HERE and HERE. Anything in the El Paso Times? Nope. What about the Inc.? No, not there also.

Just passed the Hueco Mountains and the Border Patrol station, is the Diablo Plateau. Cornudas Mountains sit to the north. The Cornudas are 35-million-year-old igneous intrusions, smaller parts of the huge volcanic event which created the Davis Mountains near Big Bend National Park.  Alamo Mountain in the Cornudas is the site of perhaps thousands of petroglyphs. Including the Cornudas and beyond them to the north in New Mexico is the Otero Mesa, a vast, unspoiled grassland of over 1,000 native wildlife species now also threatened by rare earth interest. (BTW Orkin Pest Control trucks have been spotted on the Otero Mesa. The bet is that they are killing prairie dogs.) On the Diablo Plateau, are Pronghorns, forests of cholla and Soaptree Yuccas (State flower of New Mexico). And did I mention that it sits atop the Salt Basin Aquifer.

This is a story to follow. Bookmark the Hudspeth County Herald site.