Over our Sunday bike rides the past five years or so, riding buddy John and I haven’t gone more than a month of rides without one or the other of us exclaiming “Goddamn is New Mexico producing a shit-ton of oil these days!”

Our regular periodic exclamations come from our shared obssession of staring at a webpage from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) that I am linking, in violation of my November rule of not having links (my game, my rules), just so you know we’re not making this shit up.

The visuals below are a crude copy/paste of a really spiffy visualization John put together via Claude after I sent him a lousy visualization put together via Claude based on the data in the EIA webpage. So “authorship” of the info below is a bit complicated, as is increasingly the case these days. Let’s call it John “first author,” Claude second, and me third. And I’m not putting that into formal citation format because this is a blog and I don’t have to do that shit.

So withour further waste of your time, here’s why New Mexico has more oil leases/royalties revenue than it, honestly, knows what to do with, and why the upcoming NM Legislative Session should be another doozy. I’ll only reiterate for clarity that the numbers below are all in 2026 Dollars, so inflation is taken into account. Enjoy.