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Another attempt to improve water supply for the Cuba area has been presented to the Sandoval County Commission. At its August 19 meeting, the commission was asked to endorse a proposal by KNeW to produce potable water from deep aquifers in the Rio Puerco area using ion exchange technology developed by the company. According to its prospectus, the process would be used as feedstock to produce fertilizer while potable water would be a byproduct. The County Commission was not asked to fund the project. But a decade ago, the commission spent more than $7 million on an aborted de-salinization project in the Rio Puerco area.Â
Back in 2010, Sandoval County government agreed to pay engineers to design a water desalinization plant to purify up to five million gallons of brackish water daily from a deep well in the Rio Puerco basin. County commissioners gave the go-ahead to advertise for bids to design the project despite persistent doubts over cost, disposal of salt and other impurities to be removed from the water and socio-economic implications of encouraging growth. Already $7 million in County funds had been spent to explore the feasibility of the water project intended to spur future industrial development. Building that desalinization plant was estimated to cost about $75 million, and another $28 million would be associated with disposing of the extracted salt and recovering and processing the lime.