NMT Receives $2.3 Million Contract

WASHINGTON, D. C., June 7, 2005– U.S. Senator Pete Domenici announced that the New Mexico Institute of Mining Technology has been awarded a contract worth $17.8 million from the Department of Energy (DOE) to support efforts to remove greenhouse gases from plant emissions.

Domenici serves as chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee that has funding jurisdiction over the DOE.

“I have been diligently working on a national energy policy that addresses the demand for clean, renewable energy sources, and ongoing efforts to increase these supplies include discovering innovative methods to produce cleaner fuels,” Domenici said. “NM Tech’s partnership with Sandia and Los Alamos national labs and others has tested extraction methods that could later prove to be commercially marketable. I am very proud of Tech’s efforts and applaud this new award.”

The latest action will issue $2.3 million to NM Tech as coordinator of the Southwest Regional Partnership for Carbon Sequestration for phase II of a project that extracts greenhouse gases, specifically carbon dioxide, from power plant emissions and stores the gases in soils, vegetation, or other environmentally safe forms.

The Southwest Regional Partnership includes experts in the fields of geology, engineering, economic, public policy and outreach. It involves the states of Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Utah and portions of Kansas, Nevada, Texas and Wyoming. The partnership supports Bush’s Global Climate Change Initiative, which calls for an 18 percent reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas intensity by 2012.