sa国际传媒官网网页入口

Here's a number that should stop every New Mexican cold: Oil and gas contributes roughly 53% of our state general fund (direct revenue and permanent fund investment earnings combined)  鈥� a larger share than Saudi Arabia (46%) or Texas (10%).

We are the second-largest oil producer in the United States, having surpassed 2 million barrels per day in 2024, more than double our 2019 output, according to the Dallas Fed. We are also the third-largest natural gas producer in the nation, accounting for about 8% of all U.S. natural gas production, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That production translates to roughly $35,000 worth of oil and gas wealth for every man, woman and child in New Mexico.

So where is that money?

The raw truth is: We never see most of it, because we add almost no value to what we pull out of the ground. New Mexico extracts crude oil and raw natural gas, ships most of it out of state and lets refiners, petrochemical plants and manufacturers elsewhere do the processing 鈥� and pocket the profits that should be ours. It's the classic resource trap. Economists have a name for countries that export raw commodities without building domestic industries around them. They call it the "resource curse." We are living it.

The numbers prove it. New Mexico continues to rank as one of the poorest states in the nation, according to the Maternal and Child Health Bureau. Nearly 17% of people live below the poverty level. The median household income in New Mexico is around $64,000, well below the national average of around $84,000.

World Population Review ranked our median assets per person at No. 41 among all states and Washington, D.C. One in four children in this state lives in poverty. MCHB New Mexico also has the largest gap between high-income and middle-income households of any state 鈥� 3.2 times. 

Despite record oil production, our economy has long faced significant structural challenges, including a lack of economic diversity, reliance on government and tourism jobs, and sluggish job growth that historically trails the nation. We are running one of the richest natural resource economies in the Western Hemisphere like a third-world petro-state 鈥� think Equatorial Guinea, awash in oil revenue, but with wealth concentrated at the top and poverty endemic at the bottom.

We had a real chance to change that recently. A group of investors 鈥� including partners here in New Mexico 鈥� spent years working to site a $4 billion low-carbon fertilizer plant in San Juan and Lea counties. This was exactly the kind of environmentally responsible, value-added facility that New Mexico needs: using our natural gas not just as an export commodity but as a feedstock for domestic manufacturing, creating hundreds of permanent, high-paying jobs and generating significant local tax revenue. State agencies made permitting and approval so byzantine and unreliable that the project became untenable. So it went to Wyoming instead.

Wyoming will now capture those jobs, that tax base and those wages 鈥� for a generation. That's not Wyoming's fault. That's ours.

Redistribution is not the same as economic development. A state that only taxes its extraction and distributes the proceeds will always be dependent, always be poor and always be one oil price crash away from a budget crisis.

We can do better. But it will require state government that treats industrial development as a priority 鈥� not an obstacle.

John Lonergan is a long-time Santa Fe resident and venture capitalist.