Open-file Report - 628
Mineral-Resource Potential of Portions of Southwestern New Mexico

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is developing an Environmental Assessment (EA) under provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires the assessment of mineral-resource potential for federal surface and federal minerals for a land exchange. The proposed action is a land exchange that calls for transfer of state surface and minerals of parcels within and proximal to the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks Monument from the New Mexico State Lands (SLO) to the BLM. Then, in return, the BLM will transfer BLM lands to the SLO. This report assesses the mineral-resource potential of certain BLM parcels in southwestern New Mexico and includes an assessment of selected economic mineral commodities that are most likely to be produced in the near future from these federal lands that are available for land exchange with the SLO. The assessment for each individual parcel is in Appendix 1. Most of the effort for this report was synthesis and summary of previous work and creation of various geodatabases and GIS layers for use by the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources (NMBGMR), BLM, and SLO in their evaluation efforts. The ESRI GIS program ArcMap was the GIS program used to create the maps needed for this assessment.

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