The audacious plan to refill the Great Salt Lake

The Great Salt Lake has been shriveling up for decades. At its record low about four years ago, the exposed lake bed became a source of toxic dust, with scientists warning of imminent ecological collapse. A Utah official called the lake an “environmental nuclear bomb.”

But a monumental, perhaps impossible, plan to save it has gained significant traction in recent months. The goal: refill the Great Salt Lake in just eight years.

Once a niche cause for environmental advocacy groups, the task of replenishing the lake has won support from many strange bedfellows. Republican state lawmakers in Utah have been working in close partnership with environmental organizations on restoration plans. Those efforts were already underway when Utah Gov. Spencer Cox announced last fall that the state would refill the Great Salt Lake by 2034, when Salt Lake City plans to host the Olympic Games. Josh Romney — son of former Sen. Mitt Romney — launched a $100 million philanthropic campaign in tandem with Cox’s announcement.

Last week, another unlikely ally joined the cause: “MAKE ‘THE LAKE’ GREAT AGAIN!” President Donald Trump, no friend of the Romney family, said on social media.

“Everybody’s on board,” said Tim Hawkes, a former Utah state representative who is the interim director of Romney’s fundraising project. “You’ve got the president of the United States tweeting about it. So that’s a lot of momentum.”

The undertaking, however, is immense and extremely expensive. Refilling the lake would require residents and business interests, from agriculture to mining, to use significantly less water so that more can flow into the lake and stay put. People are a primary reason for the Great Salt Lake’s decline: Its water has been overallocated, meaning users collectively have the right to more water than what flows into the lake each year.

Thus far, the pace of progress is nowhere near what’s needed to restore the lake by 2034. To have even a coin-flip chance of reaching its target level by the planned Olympic Games, Utah would need to increase the lake’s water by the amount in 400,000 Olympic swimming pools every year for the next eight years.

“It’s herculean,” said Lynn de Freitas, executive director of Friends of Great Salt Lake, an advocacy group.

The water needed annually is double the quantity the state secured for it over the past five years, according to a January task force report.

“It is going to take a lot of money,” Romney told NBC News.

He said he has raised about 30% of his $100 million goal so far. Ultimately, he added, it could take $500 million to stabilize lake levels.

No terminal saline lake — the term for a lake in which water flows to a basin with no exit and accumulates salt and other minerals — has ever been fully restored. And right now, the region has a dismal snowpack, which could again drive the water level to near record lows in the fall.

Still, advocates hope the lofty goal drives desperate action.

Utah has made a series of policy changes over the past five years aimed at raising the Great Salt Lake’s water levels, including revamping state policies to better facilitate donations, purchases and leases of water for the lake’s benefit. Now, the state and philanthropic groups like Romney’s are racing to secure the funding needed to take advantage of those options.

By the time the Olympic Games begin in 2034, Romney said, there are two possibilities: “The story is either going to be, ‘This is the first saline lake in modern history that’s been restored, or in the process of being restored.’ Or, ‘Look at this desert landscape. Look what’s happening to Utah. Look at the ecological disaster.’”

Where winter sports are concerned, replenishing the lake is not a vanity project. A 2013 study credited lake-effect snow for up to 10% of the annual snowfall in the Wasatch range, where Olympic athletes will compete. (Lake-effect snow happens when cold, dry air passes over warmer water, picking up heat and moisture). Another study estimated in 2024 that the mountains would see half as much precipitation if the lake disappeared completely.

Losing the Great Salt Lake would therefore have dire economic consequences for the region, in addition to health threats as dust laden with heavy metals wafts off the lake bed and into neighborhoods.

Romney said he was personally concerned that the lake dust would take a toll on his children’s health, but also for his real estate portfolio, like many of his peers.

“Big real estate developers were like, ‘Wow, this could really impact our business and our livelihood if even just a small percent of Utahns begin to worry about the health impact of the lakes and move elsewhere,’” he said.

Avoiding an 'environmental nuclear bomb'

When the Great Salt Lake hit rock bottom in 2022, its water level was nearly 10 feet below the threshold considered healthy. The lake’s volume had fallen about 67% since pioneers settled the valley. The desiccation left marinas that once teemed with sailboats marooned, surrounded by sand.

Salt began to concentrate in the remaining pool of water. The Great Salt Lake serves as a critical rest stop each year for about 10 million birds — more than 330 species. But researchers found in 2022 that brine flies, which form the base of the lake’s food web, and brine shrimp, a multimillion, global fish food business in Utah, had begun to disappear.

“The flies were just gone,” said Bonnie Baxter, a professor of biology at Westminster University.

Long-term drought played a role in the lake’s decline, but about 75% of the problem was human-caused, according to research published in 2022: People had simply been taking too much lake water for decades.

State officials got serious about intervention in 2022. Lawmakers created a $40 million water trust to boost water quality and quantity. They changed Utah water law to designate it a “beneficial use” for farmers to let their allotment flow to the lake, incentivizing donations and water transfers. (Before the change, unused water rights could be lost.)

State officials also raised a berm along a causeway separating the north and south arms of the lake to give them control over the flow of water and salt between the two. Then, fortuitously, twice as much snow fell in the mountains that winter as usual.

Together, those two factors “basically saved the lake” by lowering its salinity, said Kevin Perry, a University of Utah atmospheric scientist who researches the Great Salt Lake and its toxic dust.

“They filled up and diluted all the salt in the southern part of the lake with that huge snowpack,” he said.

Species returned.

“The flies this year were just robust,” Baxter said.

It was enough to avert crisis — at least temporarily.

“We have avoided that environmental nuclear bomb,” said Joel Ferry, director of the Utah Department of Natural Resources. “We have put the red button away.”

But the water levels have not returned to health, and this year’s dismal snowpack could renew the problems.

“We’re approaching record low levels again,” Hawkes said. “That tends to put pressure back on policymakers.”

How to refill a saline lake

Growing the lake is a much bigger and more expensive challenge than remedying the salinity problem. Around the world, terminal saline lakes are shrinking at an alarming rate, research shows.

Last year, Utah delivered an extra 163,468 acre-feet of water to the Great Salt Lake (an acre-foot of water is roughly half the volume of an Olympic swimming pool). It was the highest mark in five years but still far too little to reach the 2034 goal, which requires about 800,000 acre-feet every year, according to the task force report.

One way to preserve the water would be to restrict development. Residential water use in Utah has risen about 75% since the mid-1990s as the population has soared, the report says. But the state has been reluctant to hinder growth. It has also thus far not pursued what’s known as a “buy and dry strategy,” which would strip farmland of water rights. (Agriculture accounted for 65% of the lake’s depletion between 2020 and 2024, according to the report).

Instead, state agencies, nonprofit trusts and philanthropies have invested in a patchwork of solutions: subsidizing farmers to make irrigation systems more efficient, implementing more water metering to better track usage, and restructuring state water law to facilitate transfers for the lake’s benefit.

In January, Utah also bought U.S. Magnesium, a bankrupt mining company, for $30 million. The company had been using between 65,000 and 80,000 acre-feet of water in recent years and had rights to more, according to Ferry. The state will get that water for the lake, Ferry said, but it’s also on the hook to remediate a former mining area now considered a Superfund site, which will likely cost between $100 million and $200 million.

At the same time, Utah is working to remove a nonnative reed called phragmites, which is growing on the lake surface and sucking down twice as much water as native plants. Historically, the plants have covered as much as 55,000 acres of the lake, according to the task force report.

Additionally, the state is weighing whether to redirect water to the lake from the Newfoundland Evaporation Basin, an isolated, ephemeral body of water in the desert to the west. That could yield another 30,000 acre-feet annually.

Then there are the recent changes to Utah’s water laws, which created ways for the owners of water rights to lease, sell and donate those rights. But actually leasing or buying those rights to preserve water for the lake takes money.

“Those tools require a voluntary transaction between those that own the water and those that want to use the water, and that requires some capital,” said Brian Steed, who was appointed commissioner of the Great Salt Lake in 2023.

Romney’s project is designed to fill that need by leasing agricultural water. He said he wants any farmer participating to be “financially better off working with us than they would be without us.”

Ducks Unlimited, a conservation nonprofit founded by waterfowl hunters, has committed another $100 million for wetland habitat restoration.

Getting the president on board

Although environmental advocacy groups such as Friends of the Great Salt Lake, the Audubon Society and the Nature Conservancy have been pushing for years to save the Great Salt Lake, Romney said their messages had not been resonating with his community.

“A lot of the groups, particularly the nonprofit side, that advocate for the lake tend to be more left-leaning,” Romney said. “I think that tends to turn off a lot of business leaders.”

His nonprofit, Romney said, has “a very conservative, business-minded board” that includes titans of industry and philanthropy in Utah such as Mark Burnett (the television producer known for ‘The Apprentice’) and Crystal Maggelet, the CEO of FJ Management (one of the largest privately-held companies in the U.S., according to Forbes.)

“You’ve got some of the biggest foundations and the biggest family names that are really helping us move this forward,” said Casey Snider, a Republican state representative.

Cox last month successfully convinced one more big name to join the cause.

“We’re not going to let it go. That’s what I call a real environmental problem,” Trump said in an address at the annual Governors Dinner. “Saving the Great Salt Lake, that’s what we’re going to be doing.”

Trump said Cox had come to see him and described how the lake was getting smaller and drier.

Back in Utah days later, Cox said that state officials planned to request roughly $1 billion in federal support for the Great Salt Lake, according to KSL News.

Even if no federal funds materialize, Romney said, Trump’s message gives the president’s base a stake in the lake.

“I think it gives permission for a lot of people on the right, who are probably a little more wary of environmental issues, to see this is a real issue,” Romney said.

He added that he disagrees with Trump on plenty, “from temperament to policy.” Trump and Romney’s father have a long and storied feud with no shortage of name calling. (The president in a January speech described Mitt Romney as a “real loser.”) Nonetheless, the younger Romney said he would welcome any and all help.

“If President Trump gets all the credit and fixes the lake, I’m all for it,” Romney said. “It would be the greatest victory ever. All I want to see is the lake restored.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com