In the late spring of 2007, Johnny Micou and a few of his neighbors in the Galisteo Basin had heard rumblings about someone messing around with the Black Ferrill No. 1 oil well in their backyard, but didn't know much about it.

Then one day he saw a convoy of semi trucks snaking its way across the basin's dirt roads, heading toward the well — the only one of its kind in the county, which produced 17 barrels of oil in 2005.

"I grabbed my camera and jumped in my truck," Micou said recently during an interview at the now-capped well.

Micou followed the trucks, which formed a circle around the oil well. Tecton Energy of Houston — which had acquired the well — had posted a guard on the road that didn't allow access to the well site, Micou said. However, he began talking to people at the site, who said the company was about to — and later did — inject the site with carcinogenic chemicals and high-pressure water — county water — in an effort to fracture the rock and force pockets of petroleum to the surface.

Later that summer, Micou and some of his neighbors met with a Tecton vice president, who told them the company was looking for oil but would probably find natural gas, he said. Whatever the case, the recovery was going to be "unconventional," Micou said, which meant possibly thousands of wells in the Galisteo Basin and a large amount of infrastructure to extract it.

"I was stunned," Micou said. "(The vice president) was telling us everything. Their goal was to poke enough holes in the ground to find out if (extraction) was commercially viable."

Micou moved to the Galisteo Basin in 2003 partially for the peace and quiet and partially to get away from the numerous heavy-polluting industries like coal and oil that surrounded the Amarillo, Texas, area where he lived. Consequently, he knew the ramifications of what the oil company was telling him.

"This was going to be big," Micou said. "It was absolutely going to transform this area south of Santa Fe ... from a rural and open space area to an industrial zone."

Petroleum extraction could have polluted the air and water, destroyed wildlife and vegetation, peace and quiet as well as archaeological sites, he said. However, Micou knew there was another, more pressing problem at that time.

"I realized no one knew about it," he said.

Initially, Micou only knew in his heart that he was going to deal with the issue, but he didn't know how. Then, in the middle of the night, the answer came to him, he said.

"I realized communication was the problem," he said. "So I started a blog and the blog took off."

He called the blog Drilling Santa Fe and set about educating his neighbors and the city at large about the threat lurking in the Galisteo Basin any way he could. By the fall, Tecton officials — who had bought 65,000 acres of mineral rights in the basin — began holding town hall meetings. They told neighbors about owning the mineral rights underneath their property, and that they planned to drill through aquifers in their quest for oil, Micou said.

"That really got people fired up," he said. "People were hotter than I thought they would be. And the more Tecton talked, the worse it got. We always joked that they were our best PR."

By November, Santa Fe County Commissioners voted unanimously to impose a moratorium on drilling in the basin. Gov. Bill Richardson followed suit in January, when he signed a state moratorium on oil and gas drilling in the Galisteo Basin and ordered state agencies to study the issue and report back to him.

Then, in December, the county passed an ordinance governing oil and gas drilling that requires extraction companies to study the site for impacts and pay for infrastructure if they want to drill for oil and gas.

"Santa Fe County's ordinance is the best protection ordinance at the local level in the United States," Micou said.

Tecton apparently didn't like it and recapped Black Ferrill No. 1 and abandoned it, Micou said, though the economy might have had something to do with that decision.

Asked if he felt he and his neighbors won, Micou said, "Yes, in a lot of ways." Still, he credited others in the basin who helped expose the issue, as well as Richardson for stopping the drilling threat.

"I was an unwilling participant," he said when asked if he felt proud of himself. "I kept trying to get others to take it over. It became a movement. I've never been a part of something like that."

Richard Griscom, a Galisteo Basin resident since 1971, was one of nine people to nominate Micou for this year's 10 Who Made a Difference awards. Before Micou came along, Griscom said he knew very little about plans for drilling in the basin, and even less about the ramifications of such actions.

"He was the principal driving force behind ... getting the county to improve its gas and oil ordinance," Griscom said.

Griscom said he's happy with the ordinance because of its "deterrent effect on oil and gas drilling."

"In my experience, there are very few people who have made as much of a difference in protecting the local environment as Johnny Micou," Griscom said in his nominating letter.

Three more Galisteo residents, Cynthia and Frank Lux and Marilyn Forbes, also nominate Micou and credited him with spearheading the effort to stop Tecton.

"He works tirelessly to create a safe environment for us and for the future of our children," they wrote in their nominating letter.

Contact Jason Auslander at 986-3076 or :jauslander@sfnewmexican.com.