Great Salt Lake Minerals’s hopes for adding potash production from the Great Salt Lake are in the hands of the Army Corps of Engineers, which is being flooded by comments for and against as it conducts the required environmental impact study. Great Salt Lake Minerals is a unit of Compass Minerals, Overland Park, Kan.
The company is planning to increase potash production over several years by expanding its solar evaporation ponds by up to 91,000 acres.
“They are rolling in as we speak,” Jason Gipson, the corps chief of the Utah/Nevada regulatory branch, told the local press. “The last couple of days we have been flooded with them. A lot of alternatives and issues come from these comments, bringing up information on issues that we were not aware of.”
Gipson said the comments have been split about evenly between those people who are adamantly opposed and those in favor, and include a letter writing campaign generating about 1,200 postcards. Opponents maintain the new ponds will jeopardize wildlife habitat, especially of birds, and may irreparably damage the Great Salt Lake in general. But GSLM has said the expansion is almost exclusively on the lake’s most desolate area where there are no fish, marshes, brine shrimp, or bugs.
“New ponds in this area would have zero effect on the millions of birds that flock to the eastern and southern parts of the lake,” said GSLM spokesman Dave Hyams. “The only birds on the west side are pelicans who nest on Gunnison Island; GSLM’s nearest pond would be a full three miles from Gunnison to ensure the sanctity of the nesting areas.”
In the meantime, GSLM has given $25,000 to Utah’s Westminster College to assist the Great Salt Lake Institute. Hyams explained that the institute will be doing the research necessary for understanding the lake and changes that affect lake levels and bird populations, which “are important in determining how you go forward with sensible policies that protect the lake, the human and bird populations, and the economy.”