Crews are surveying thousands of feet beneath Albuquerque's West Mesa, searching for salty underground water that New Mexico hopes can one day help ease one of the state's most pressing problems: a worsening, persistent drought. The surveying effort is focused first on the Middle Rio Grande Basin, where two deep wells are planned at a site called Quail Ranch, each targeting a depth of 7,600 feet.
The push is part of a broader state effort to size up its underground brackish-water reserves, which KOAT reports are estimated to hold 1.3 trillion gallons. Brackish water is less salty than seawater but still requires desalination before it can be used for drinking or agriculture, according to the station's report. Jeffrey Samson, a water resources engineer with WSP, the firm contracted by the state to conduct the survey, said the two Quail Ranch wells are central to the current round of exploration.
WSP describes this stage of the work as exploratory and analytical only. “The current phase is exploratory and analytical, with no construction at this stage,” the firm says in its own account of the project. That framing matters for a state still working out whether, and how, it could eventually turn this underground resource into usable water.
Estimates of the Resource Vary Widely
Just how much brackish water sits beneath New Mexico depends on which document you read. KOAT's report cites a New Mexico Environment Department finding that the reserves could amount to nearly 4 million acre-feet of water — for comparison, Elephant Butte Lake, the state's largest reservoir, holds about 2.2 million acre-feet when full, per the same KOAT report. A separate snippet from the Environment Department's draft feasibility study gives a far larger range: between 2 billion and 4 billion acre-feet, or 652 trillion to 1,303 trillion gallons. The two figures come from different parts of the state's own paperwork, and the available reporting does not explain how they relate to one another.
Handling what comes out of the ground, if the project moves forward, brings its own complications. Desalination also leaves behind concentrate, a salty byproduct that can be costly to manage, as the Santa Fe New Mexican reported. Samson said New Mexico is being consulted about a deep injection well or evaporation ponds to handle that waste stream, adding that the parties involved are moving in the same direction — something he described as promising.
Money Flowing Into Mapping and Treatment
More than $40 million in state grants and contracts have been allocated for surveying and development work, the station's report notes. That includes more than $13 million in contracts announced earlier for mapping, testing and treating brackish groundwater, with the largest single award — $9.1 million — going to WSP to study brackish-water availability specifically in the Middle Rio Grande Basin. Lawmakers added another $35 million to the Strategic Water Supply Program during the 2026 legislative session.
The legal foundation for the effort traces back to the Strategic Water Supply Act, which the New Mexico Legislature passed in 2025 with Sen. George Muñoz as a co-sponsor. The bill's own text says its sections may be cited as the Strategic Water Supply Act, and the law aims to explore brackish water as a supplemental resource as the state works toward a goal of establishing large-scale desalination plants. Muñoz has said New Mexico must confront its statewide water crisis and the realities of life in the arid Southwest, though he has also voiced frustration with how the work has unfolded — saying the state has been slow, has not met the challenge, and that funding has been slow and poorly targeted.
That urgency lines up with the scale of the problem described elsewhere in state planning documents. The governor's 50-Year Water Action Plan estimates New Mexico will face a shortfall of more than 244 billion gallons over the next 50 years, and water experts cited by Source NM say climate-pattern changes and groundwater overuse could cut the state's water supplies by 25% in coming decades.
El Paso Offers a Working Example Next Door
New Mexico doesn't have to look far for a real-world model of what large-scale brackish desalination can look like. El Paso Water has operated the Kay Bailey Hutchison Desalination Plant since 2007, and El Paso Matters describes it as the largest inland desalination plant in the world. The plant converts nearly 30 million gallons of brackish water daily and serves about 100,000 people, using reverse osmosis to filter salt out of the water it draws from underground.
Scott Reinert, resources manager for El Paso Water, said the city built the plant to address drought while continuing to rely on the Rio Grande as a water supply. Plant superintendent Sal Morales has described the process in more technical terms, saying the facility's membrane separates material at a molecular level. Figures on how much the plant might eventually expand differ depending on the source: El Paso Water itself says capacity could grow to as much as 42 million gallons per day in coming years, while El Paso Matters previously reported a planned expansion to 33 million gallons per day.
El Paso Water disposes of its desalination concentrate through deep-well injection into geological formations 22 miles northeast of the plant, and the utility has also partnered with Critical Materials Corporation to recover minerals from the wastewater as a more cost-effective disposal option.
Back in New Mexico, the brine-management plan for the state's own project has already been submitted to the New Mexico Environment Department, and Samson said it is expected to be finalized within the next month. Zach Stoll, with the New Mexico Desalination Association, called the Strategic Water Supply Act a significant step forward for a state still in the early, exploratory phase of figuring out whether the salty water beneath the West Mesa can become part of its long-term answer to drought.
