Editor’s note: This article is published through the Great Salt Lake Collaborative, a solutions journalism initiative that partners news, education and media organizations to help inform people about the plight of the Great Salt Lake.

SALT LAKE CITY — U.S. Magnesium ceased mineral operations in 2021 amid some equipment failures, which ultimately led to its bankruptcy filing last year.

Yet, state officials say the Tooele County plant was still pulling 50,000 to 80,000 acre-feet of water out of the Great Salt Lake every year, which is about as much as some medium-sized reservoirs can handle and a large chunk of its nearly 145,000 acre-feet in water rights.

It was also the third time that the 4,500-acre facility had shut down over issues, so when its assets went up for auction, Utah leaders decided to strike.

“Rather than just try to reorganize and do the same thing again … the state said, ‘Hey, there’s an opportunity, and we’re going to step up,’” said Joel Ferry, director of the Utah Department of Natural Resources.

Utah agencies and lawmakers acted quickly, swooping in and purchasing it for $30 million during a bankruptcy auction last month. It outbid LiMag Holdings, a company with ties to the plant’s owner, to keep all that water in the lake.

The state’s purchase was finalized last week, after funds from a rainy day account were included in a base budget bill that Gov. Spencer Cox signed. Great Salt Lake Rising, a philanthropic effort to fund lake solutions, ultimately served as a “backstop” to fund the purchase if the state wasn’t able to transfer the funds that quickly.

Utah is now looking at what’s next for the site, including what its duties and obligations are, Ferry told state legislators in a meeting about lake issues on Tuesday.

What the state does know is that it has a mess to clean up. The Environmental Protection Agency included it on its list of hazardous superfund sites in 2009.

“Facility operations and waste disposal practices contaminated soil, air, surface water and groundwater with hazardous chemicals,” the agency wrote, adding that it posed a threat to workers, as well as birds and wildlife.

What the cleanup looks like is still unclear, though. Utah already had a liability with the site because it’s on sovereign lands, and it had leased mineral rights to the company. But now that it owns the site, it doesn’t have a full picture of the situation.

The state has yet to determine how large the contamination is or what all the contaminants are, which will help understand how much it will cost to fix it, said Tim Davis, director of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality. All of that will be compiled into a record of decision outlining how it’ll be cleaned up in the future.

“It’ll take time; it will not happen immediately. A lot of this is very complex, and there will be additional resources. (We’ll) need funding to pay for that cleanup,” he told KSL after the meeting, adding that having the state jump ahead and compile this saves time and money rather than waiting on the federal government.

No timeline has been set for when the report will be released, but Davis suspects the cleanup will take years to complete.

It will be a “significant cost,” which Utah could pay for through new mineral extraction agreements, Ferry said. The critical minerals within the lake, like salt, lithium, potash and, yes, magnesium, are still in high demand, and there are new technologies that can extract them without using much water.

“We’re looking at those kinds of opportunities to do this in the right way,” he said. “But from an air quality perspective (and) from a water quantity perspective, this was one of the biggest things we could have done today to lead to a positive change on Great Salt Lake.”