Adam Richins looked outside and saw a brownish hue spanning the horizon across Millard County. “It’s a dust bowl,” he said.
Richins, Millard County’s planner, is sure the Sevier Dry Lake is a contributor to dust storms. He doesn’t know how much, though. Neither the county nor the state currently monitors it.
“We’ve got 6,800 square miles, much of which is dirt, in our county,” he said. “So, kind of hard to narrow down to any one particular location.”
Researchers who study dust pollution in Utah have zeroed in on the dry lakebed, however.
“Right now, Sevier Dry Lake is, we think, the biggest dust source in the state of Utah,” said Kevin Perry, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Utah. “That’s in its current state.”
In the coming year, a recently approved potash mine may kick up even more dust from the area. On June 10, the Bureau of Land Management gave Peak Minerals the go ahead to start extracting potash — an important mineral used in fertilizer — from brine beneath the dried lake’s crust. Peak Minerals has rights to mine the entire lakebed, covering 118,000 acres of federal lands managed by BLM and 6,400 acres of state lands managed by the Trust Lands Administration.
Peak Minerals recently received the green light from federal regulators to mine potash from the dry Sevier Lake playa. It revised plans call for mining half the lakebed to start as phase 1, with the option to expand across the entire surface in the future as phase 2.
Once in operation, the mine will increase dust pollution from the area on both a daily and annual basis, according to the BLM’s environmental analysis.
Dust storms are already a common occurrence in Millard County, and can cause deadly brownout conditions on highways.
“There’s going to be more evaporation, because that’s the whole point,” said Greg Carling, a Brigham Young University geology professor who has studied regional pollution caused by drying lakes. “It seems like long term, that could make things worse.”
The valuable minerals beneath the Sevier salt pan
Sevier Lake is a salty terminal lake, like the Great Salt Lake, and a remnant of ancient Lake Bonneville. Its water mostly comes from the Sevier River, one of the most over-tapped rivers in the nation. Upstream diversions, mostly by agriculture, mean the lake is dry most of the year.
Its desiccated lakebed has become one of the largest sources of dust pollution on the Wasatch Front, even though it lies more than 120 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. Research shows its dust lands on the region’s snowpack and accelerates melting. It’s also unhealthy and can exacerbate conditions like asthma or trigger heart attacks.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) The Salt Lake City skyline covered in dust on a windy day, Monday, May 12, 2025.
Because of its similarities to the Great Salt Lake, Sevier Lake also contains a plethora of potash. Peak Minerals plans to specifically mine sulfate of potash, a fertilizer mineral used on high-value crops like avocados and almonds. Compass Minerals, the largest extraction company operating on the Great Salt Lake, is currently the only domestic producer of the material.
Compass harvests its potash by siphoning briny lake water into evaporation ponds and concentrating the minerals. But because Sevier Lake has little surface water, Peak Minerals plans to excavate trenches up to 20 feet deep, exposing brine in the clays below and channeling it to solar evaporation ponds built on the playa surface.
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Aerial photographs of evaporation ponds at Compass Minerals in Ogden, April 11, 2022.
The BLM finalized an environmental review for the project and allowed it to proceed in 2019, but Peak Minerals ran into financial troubles and the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, it presented BLM with a scaled-down version of its plan, which will cover half the lakebed, producing 215,000 tons of potash a year, with the possibility to later expand.
How much worse a dust source Sevier Lake may become, Perry said, “depends on the disturbance to the surrounding area and what drawing down groundwater will do for the rest of the lakebed.”
Regional impacts to water in short supply
Groundwater decline is what has dust researchers and some environmental advocates concerned.
“What happens when they’re done mining?” said Hanna Larsen, an attorney with Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “It’s just going to be dry and dusty because they took all the water from the area.”
The BLM’s environmental analysis found that increased dust emissions would end after mine decommissioning. Peak Minerals also denies the project will have long-term air quality consequences.
“The surface of the playa has been dry for several years,” said Dean Pekeski, the company’s CEO and president, in an email. “As such, drawing down brine water and fresh groundwater will have no impact.”
Peak Minerals currently has rights each year to 1,500 acre-feet of underground freshwater, 270,000 acre-feet of briny groundwater beneath Sevier Lake and 250,000 acre-feet of surface water after it has reached the lakebed.
An acre-foot is about enough water to supply two households annually.
Millard County supports the project, said County Commissioner Bill Wright.
The mine will create between 225 and 275 jobs during the estimated three-year construction phase and 175 jobs once in production, Peak Minerals predicts.
“We’ve got an old, dry lake bed out there,” Wright said. “I don’t know what negative concern there should be.”
(Courtesy photo by Peak Minerals) The BLM has approved a complex of canals and evaporation ponds on Utah's dry Sevier lakebed, where Peak Minerals plans to produce sulfate of potash.
But when minerals companies began filing for water rights with the state to mine Sevier Lake in 2009, Millard County filed protests citing concerns over dust and groundwater supplies.
Letters officials sent to the Division of Water Rights noted the project would “substantially” reduce vegetation which depends on groundwater, destabilize soils and generate more dust.
“Air quality is specifically impacted by the alkali nature” of the area’s dust, the county wrote in its protests, “resulting in public health impacts and other social costs.”
The BLM, Fish Springs Wildlife Management Area and the Central Iron County Water District also filed protests, all citing concerns about impacts to regional groundwater. BLM withdrew its protest in 2012.
In a statement, the BLM said it was “confident” the mitigation measures included in its 2019 final environmental impact statement would address impacts to water.
Environmental advocacy groups, however, assert the agency’s study was inadequate.
SUWA commissioned its own review of the area’s hydrology by a licensed geologist. It found the BLM had relied on “fundamentally flawed and unrealistic assumptions” when accounting for impacts to the aquifer. The agency used its own model of groundwater drawdown instead of relying on a more comprehensive model developed by the U.S. Geological Service, which shows impacts extending as far as Fish Springs, more than 70 miles north of Sevier Dry Lake.
The BLM also failed to consider cumulative impacts from the future Pine Valley Water Supply project, which expects to pipe 15,000 acre-feet of groundwater from neighboring Beaver County to serve parched communities like Cedar City. Pumping for that project is also expected to significantly impact the aquifer in the Sevier Desert.
“These basins are all connected throughout the west desert and into Nevada,” said Kyle Roerink, director of the Great Basin Water Network. “We need to be cautious. Stresses in one area can stress another.”
Plans to manage dust
Peak Minerals developed a dust mitigation plan as part of its federal environmental review.
But it only accounts for on-site activities, like disturbing the playa, moving equipment and transporting material, not the long-term impacts from potentially further drying up Sevier Lake.
Any dust blowing off the playa which doesn’t originate from within the company’s operational boundary would be considered a naturally occurring source and not actionable by regulators, according to Bryce Bird, director of the Utah Division of Air Quality.
He added dry areas on Sevier Lake generating dust are only about an inch deep.
“There’s often wet material under it,” Bird said. “... I’m not sure if drawing the water down on the far end of the lake will impact that.”
(Utah Highway Patrol) Damage from a multi-vehicle accident after a dust storm in July 2021, in Millard County near Kanosh.
The division recently received funding to build a Great Salt Lake dust monitoring network. Regulators have considered adding sensors near Sevier Lake, Bird confirmed, but the effort will mostly focus on population centers on the Wasatch Front.
Before it can begin construction, Peak Minerals needs to secure $435 million, which may take six to nine months, Pekeski said. That’s a short wait, though, for a company which has tried to mine potash at Sevier Lake for years.
Pekeski said he is optimistic the company will secure financing this time around. “We’ve got a project that doesn’t cost as much to build and actually delivers a higher return for investors compared to the larger project” which BLM approved in 2019, he said.
This project supports an executive order Trump issued in March to increase domestic mineral production and reduce reliance on foreign materials, the BLM said in a press statement on June 10.
“We’re thankful to the BLM and to President Trump’s executive order,” Pekeski said. “We feel that has perhaps shone a light on our project and given it a bit more of a higher profile for investors.”