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Santa Fe man’s Southern N.M. garnet operation could transform the market
Mining prospects
unearthed
Mandela makes final journey home The South African peacemaker’s body was returned to his hometown Saturday as the nation prepared for Sunday’s funeral. PAGE A-3
SFPS redraws boundaries New attendance lines will reduce overcrowding at some schools. LOCAL NEWS, C-1
U.S. stands with Newtown The country marks the anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary tragedy. PAGE A-2
Speculation builds about Martinez on 2016 ticket ABOVE: Andradite garnet from the Orogrande site is captured in a strainer by geologists, who sample the drilling area in 5-foot intervals.
Pundits say it’s likely GOP could tap governor for national office
COURTESY ARNAND VAN HEERDEN/TETRA TECH
RIGHT: Santa Fe businessman Daniel Burrell at the Orogrande mine site in November.
By Steve Terrell The New Mexican
BRUCE KRASNOW/THE NEW MEXICAN
By Bruce Krasnow The New Mexican
OROGRANDE riving through this stark landscape south of Alamogordo, it’s easy to miss Orogrande with its one convenience store, post office and a closed-up mining museum. Still, there are enough relics and beatendown structures that one can picture the boom years of the 1900s, when men flooded the area, living in tents to seek out gold and turquoise. By 1905, the year after a 6½-ounce gold nugget was discovered in a dry wash, the rush had spawned a railroad, a smelter, a 16-person real estate office, a barbershop, a hotel and nine saloons. “Rich ore poured out of the mines by the trainload,” reads an Otero County history blog. By the 1940s, the area was largely mined out, and today the Orogrande Trading Post on U.S. 54 is the center of the community for its 50 residents. But when the sun is just right, the mineral left behind by those seeking easy money reflects in the hillsides. And if Santa Fe businessman Daniel Burrell is right, then Orogrande, in New Mexico’s Jarilla Mountains, will soon be known for having the largest reserve of garnet in the United States. Gemstone-quality garnet is rare and largely found in places such as Madagascar and South Africa. What Orogrande offers is an industrial garnet increasingly needed by manufacturers for cleaning, cutting and air blasting. One of the hardest materials, garnet is cleaner than sand and silica, but 90 percent of the garnet purchased in the United States is imported. The domestic production of garnet in the U.S. — in New York, Montana and Idaho — now stands at 35,000 tons a year. Within three
D
years, if all goes as planned, the Orogrande mine owned by Burrell Western Resources may be producing 100,000 tons a year. “In the United States, there is no deposit as significant as this,” said Burrell, a former White House staffer and Democratic campaign adviser who moved to Santa Fe to head Rosemont Realty, a privately held company that owns commercial property in 24 states. What it means for Burrell is not just a personal business challenge, but jobs and economic development for a rural stretch of the state, 50 miles north of El Paso. He is prepared to invest $25 million of family money in the initial phase of the project, which will bring 50 jobs at first and more later when a processing plant opens in Anthony, N.M. Eventually, the number of jobs might double or triple as the 2.5 million-ton reserve of andradite garnet is mined over the next two decades, injecting $1 billion into the state’s economy. “It’s such a ridiculous opportunity,” Burrell said during an interview in his Santa Fe home. “Twenty years ago, if you stumbled on this, you’d probably have to pass — there was no market.” The find is an amazing coincidence of climate and geology, said Peter Harbin, a Las Cruces-based consultant who advises mineral companies and has been working with Burrell. Garnet, he said, is fairly common, but is often eroded and washed away with concentrations too thin to economically extract. And many areas that have the mineral — there are garnet reserves in the San Pedro Mountains of Santa Fe County, for instance — are isolated, meaning transportation and labor costs are very high. The rocks in the Orogrande mine are 75 percent to 90 percent pure garnet, “one of
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Collected Works Christmas Players Readings of holiday stories and poems by Ali MacGraw, Jonathan Richards, Bob Martin and Carol McGiffin, 4 p.m., Collected Works Bookstore, 202 Galisteo St., no charge, 988-4226.
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Orogrande mining site
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El Paso THE NEW MEXICAN
the highest [concentrations] that I’ve come across in my career,” said Harbin, who has been working in minerals for 30 years. That means that every rock taken will be mostly garnet, so there is less waste. “I wouldn’t say it’s unique, but it’s certainly special,” he said. And the fact that the mineral is within two miles of a major highway and close to the surface makes the project more viable. “It’s at the surface,” he said. “You can go and see and pick out the garnet.”
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Obituaries
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Earthfriendly holiday lighting Sunny much of the time. High 41, low 22.
Dump those old incandescent bulbs for energy-saving LED strands.
PAGE C-12
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Editor: Ray Rivera, 986-3033, rrivera@sfnewmexican.com Design and headlines: Kristina Dunham, kdunham@sfnewmexican.com
Even before Susana Martinez was sworn in as New Mexico’s first Hispanic female governor, there was some speculation in the national media that she could be a potential candidate on a national Republican ticket. The whispers turned into a murmur last year, when Martinez gave a well-received speech at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla. That murmur rose to a shout recently, Susana after Martinez made campaign Martinez appearances with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie the day before his landslide re-election in November. Suddenly, there was a slew of headlines speculating about a Christie/Martinez ticket in 2016.
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Pope Francis’ crackdown on order alarms traditionalists By Nicole Winfield The Associated Press
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis may have been named Time magazine’s Person of the Year, but he has come under scathing criticism from a growing number of traditionalist Catholics for cracking down on a religious order that celebrates the old Latin Mass. The case has become a flashpoint in the ideological tugof-war going on in the Catholic Church over Francis’ revolutionary agenda, which has thrilled progressives and alarmed some Pope Francis conservatives. The matter concerns the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, a small but growing order of several hundred priests, seminarians and nuns that was founded in Italy in 1990 as an
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