Company claims it already has leases to pull a vast amount of lithium and water from the lake, which state officials adamantly deny.
at the nation’s largest operational lithium mine — by 2025.
, Crutchfield said he felt “both surprised and deeply disappointed by representations made” in the discussions, and took umbrage with Barnes and Snider implying Compass acted “wrongly” and “contrary to law.” He called Barnes’s statements “incorrect.” He bristled at the suggestion their pilot lithium test was “covert.”
“They have to have an agreement for each mineral or product they take out of that lake,” the lawmaker said., submitted to the SEC in 2022, notes it “must” modify its royalty agreement to mine the mineral. “Compass is out of compliance,” Snider said, “and needs to be working with the state of Utah instead of finding ways to cheat the taxpayer.”The bill Snider passed this year requires companies to mitigate any water depletions to the Great Salt Lake for any new materials they start harvesting, including lithium. It also requires extractors to pay a severance tax on any new materials recovered from the lake, treating them the same as other resources mined in the state like oil and gas.
FFSL traditionally collects round $10 million each year from lake extractors, which is invested back into improving the lake’s health and other state lands. But the miners are raking in “hundreds of millions” more off the lake’s resources, Schultz said. And many of the existing leases were signed decades ago, before the state faced its present water crisis.
“Under current statute and current law,” Schultz said, “they have the right to deplete and use that water until it’s the last drop left in the lake.”
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