U.S. District Judge Robert Brack has ruled that the portion of the mineral rights that were not sold to the American people when the Valles Caldera National Preserve was was established in 2000 are worth $3.8 million, according to a story in today’s Albuquerque Journal. Click here to read the full story (after clicking on the prior link, non-subscribers must click on the “trial premium pass” button on the bottom left of the screen to read the article).
When the Baca Ranch was purchased in 2000 for $101 million, the federal government was able to negotiate a mutually acceptable price for the purchase of only 87.5% of the mineral rights to the land.
Concerned that the owners of the remaining 12.5% of the mineral rights might seek to build a geothermal power plant on the National Preserve, the U.S. government condemned these mineral rights in 2006. However, that action required that the owners of the interests be compensated, but the parties had been unable to establish a fair compensation price: the U.S. government initially offered the owners $1.8 million, but the owners asserted that the value of these rights was $14 million. Brack also ruled that the government pay an additional $50,000 in legal costs.
This news is a postscript to the era of geothermal exploration on the Baca Ranch/VCNP, which began in 1960 when an oil test well was built on the western base of Redondo Peak that did not strike oil, but instead struck superheated water (Anschutz and Merlan, 2007). After several more geothermal exploration wells were built in the 1960s, a partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy, Union Oil of California, and Public Service Company of New Mexico was formed in July of 1978 to assess the feasibility of building a geothermal power plant on the ranch. The partnership drilled 20 deep wells, but determined that a potential power plant built there could only generate 20 megawatts of electricity, despite the hope at the outset that it could generate up to 400 megawatts. Consequently, the project was disbanded in 1982. In total, about 40 geothermal test wells were drilled on the Baca Ranch through 1983 (Anschutz and Merlan, 2007). Sealed wells can be seen to this day on the Preserve in Redondo Canyon as well as Alamo Canyon.
Click here to read the entire chapter, “Industrial Mineral Extraction and Geothermal Exploration,” from the U.S. government publication More Than a Scenic Mountain Landscape: Valles Caldera National Preserve Land Use History, by Kurt F. Anschutz and Thomas Merlan, published into the public domain in 2007. To download other chapters of this book, click here.
For more information on the geothermal characteristics of the Valles Caldera, check out the following articles:
Geothermal Potential of Valles Caldera, New Mexico (PDF), by Fraser Goff. GHC Bulletin, Dec. 2002.
Valles Caldera Scientific Drilling, by Fraser Goff and Jeffrey M. Heikoop. Geotimes, Mar. 2004.
Finally, a sizable amount of information on the overall geology of the Caldera can be found on VallesCaldera.com’s Geology page.
