The U.S. Bureau of Land Management admits that it doesn’t know how many bidders there will be when 125,762 acres of the Sevier Dry Lake in west/central Utah, where there are known potash deposits, will be offered in 64 parcels for competitive leasing in April.
For certain, according to BLM officials, there will be Emerald Peaks Minerals, a small Salt Lake City-based company that has been eyeing the area’s potential since 2008. “They are the project proponents, and based on their expression of interest the BLM completed the environmental analysis with the decision to go out for competitive lease sale in the first week of April,” Utah BLM spokesman Mitch Snow told Green Markets.
Great Salt Lake Minerals, which extracts sulfate of potash from the Great Salt Lake in northern Utah, has said that it is not interested in Sevier Dry Lake.
Actually, Emerald Peaks wasn’t the first to realize the potential. Snow indicated that there were at least two others working the area in the late 1980s and again in 1997, but neither went commercial. There was also actual production of sodium chloride in the late 1980s.
The Sevier Dry Lake potash reserves were estimated by Hazen Research at 5.2 million st. At a projected 50 percent recovery, production would continue for approximately 6.5 years at the rate of 400,000 st/y. In addition, the mine would be in operation for an additional two to three years for the initial development. Final reclamation would likely proceed for several years after final potash production.
The maximum lease size for a potash lease parcel under federal rules for leasing solid minerals other than coal and oil shale is 2,560 acres. Consequently, BLM has divided Sevier Dry Lake into 64 lease parcels. The maximum acreage of potash lease holdings for one entity in one state totals 96,000 acres.
The BLM expects that to develop the lease the lease holders will need to build dikes, ponds, associated access roads, and other facilities in the lease area, and on surrounding rights of way. Extraction techniques could include a number of surface ditches to recover the shallow brines and a number of wells for the deeper brines. These brines would be concentrated using solar evaporation. The minerals would then be harvested, compacted, and dried for transportation to market.
BLM noted that about 93 percent of the 2009 world potash production was consumed by the fertilizer industry, and 80 percent of what’s used on farms in the U.S. has to be imported.
BLM had the environmental assessment written and posted for the 30-day comment period on Sept. 20, when it was decided, based on comments by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, that the area needed to be reviewed for wilderness characteristics.
The BLM also determined that a wilderness inventory for the area should be completed in compliance with Secretarial Order 3310 issued on Dec. 23, 2010. Following completion of this inventory, the BLM has determined that the Sevier Lake does not have wilderness characteristics. The determination was based on the lack of outstanding opportunities for “solitude,” as well as the lack of outstanding opportunities for a “primitive and unconfined recreation experience.” A large portion of the dry lake bed also failed to meet the requirements for “naturalness.”
Once a lease is issued, the BLM must approve a mining plan before any mining can commence. The proposed mining plan must also be analyzed through the public process set out by the National Environmental Policy Act. In addition, the State of Utah must issue a permit under the Utah Mined Land Reclamation Act of 1975.