New Mexico awards $26 million in grant funds to seven brackish water projects

A water treatment plant in the Alamo Navajo Chapter and research on recovering high-purity water from salty water at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology are just two of the initial projects being funded by New Mexico’s Strategic Water Supply program.

“The science tells us that 50 years out, we're going to have 25% less fresh water in New Mexico,” said Rebecca Roose, the governor’s senior infrastructure adviser. “So, what this program represents is opportunities to keep growing local economies, keep investing in vibrant communities, while we also simultaneously take other actions to conserve our freshwater resources.”

New Mexico’s Legislature created the Strategic Water Supply program in the 2025 regular session to award grants and contracts from $40 million in one-time funds to projects that reduce state reliance on freshwater resources or expand water reuse opportunities. The New Mexico Environment Department and Office of the State Engineer announced $25.9 million of those funds have been awarded to seven grant recipients Wednesday. Another $13 million in contracts will be announced in the coming months.

“The grants that are awarded represent a really wide variety of projects,” said Deputy State Engineer Tanya Trujillo. “We have communities that are small, rural, tribal, and we have research institutions.”

The agencies running the program and the Governor’s Office are trying to create momentum in New Mexico around safely using brackish water, according to Roose.

Brackish water is naturally occurring water that’s saltier than freshwater but usually not as salty as seawater. It sometimes contains other dissolved solids. New Mexico’s brackish water resources are largely undeveloped due to the cost of characterizing deep aquifers, constructing wells and water treatment, according to a 2024 New Mexico Strategic Water Supply feasibility study.

Estimates put the amount of brackish water in New Mexico aquifers at 2 to 4 billion acre-feet, but information about the quality and volume of water in brackish aquifers is “vastly inconsistent throughout the state,” because there aren’t enough aquifer characterization studies, according to the feasibility study.

The New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources is investigating underground water resources to find out more about where brackish and freshwater are located, Trujillo said.

The Alamo Navajo School Board already knows what brackish water it will be treating with a small-scale water treatment plant that will be built using $1.9 million of the newly awarded grant funds. The Alamo Navajo Chapter’s community well has been coming up salty more and more often, according to Jonas Armstrong, director of the New Mexico Environment Department’s Water Protection Division. The well is essential to the community, Armstrong said, and supplies water to the chapter’s health clinic.

The project “will reduce their need to rely on neighbors who are also dealing with declining water resources, and it will allow the 1,000 or so folks who live on the Alamo Chapter to keep living there for generations,” Armstrong said.

The highest-dollar grant award was $11.7 million to the village of Cuba for design and pre-construction activity on a zero-waste desalination facility. The facility could produce an estimated 518,000 gallons of potable water per day, generating jobs and revenue, according to a state Environment Department news release. The desalination process has a byproduct of brine — water with a high-concentration of salt — which will be used for a marketable product, fertilizer, Trujillo said. There is a one-year timeline for the design phase, according to Armstrong.

“This investment represents confidence in rural New Mexico and in Cuba’s future,” Cuba Mayor Denny Herrera said in a statement.

The grant awards also include:

• $6 million to Laguna Pueblo for a tribal-led feasibility study to characterize brackish water resources and support long-term water resilience.
• $3 million to the Arrowhead Center at New Mexico State University to establish a Brine Valorization Accelerator Hub meant to convert waste brines into valuable products and build a statewide water-technology ecosystem.
• $1.6 million to the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology for advanced membrane research to recover over 98% high-purity water while reducing brine waste and supporting clean energy supply chains.
• $1.4 million to the city of Anthony for environmental analysis and testing in a brackish groundwater pilot, meant to produce scalable recommendations and a permitting roadmap for statewide use.
• $400,000 for the University of New Mexico to do a statewide evaluation of economic and environmental tradeoffs associated with brackish water management. The study will examine brackish water from cradle to grave, examining how it’s used, what it can be used for and what to do with it after use, Armstrong said.

The governor will request another one-time infusion of nonrecurring funding into the Strategic Water Supply program in the upcoming 30-day legislative session, Roose said. The exact dollar amount of that request is not publicly available yet, but when the Environment Department submitted its budget requests for the coming fiscal year, it included a $75 million request for the Strategic Water Supply.

“There's over 100 inland desalination plants in the United States outside of New Mexico, so we are proudly playing catch-up a bit here and representing that we can leave our precious freshwater resources for the most vulnerable in our communities, for drinking water, for crops, for livestock, and tap into treated brackish water to continue to build our state and diversify our economy,” Roose said.

Cathy Cook covers the federal government for the Albuquerque Journal. Reach her via email at ccook@abqjournal.com.