Utah Cedar Valley

Cedar Valley occupies a high-desert basin in Utah County, flanked by the Oquirrh Mountains to the east and the West Desert to the west. Eagle Mountain, a rapidly growing city of roughly 60,000, sits on the valley’s eastern margin. Mormon settler families drilled the first irrigation wells and planted the first dryland wheat in the late nineteenth century, and the valley carried that agricultural pattern into the twenty-first. The Skull Valley Band of Goshute Nation holds its reservation 30 miles to the west, in Tooele County, on land whose hydrology connects through the same sub-basin.

Meta opened its first Eagle Mountain campus building in 2021 and drew approximately 35 million gallons in 2024 from the Cedar Valley groundwater column. The city held that figure confidential until environmental disclosure requirements forced its release. Google, QTS, and Tract subsequently assembled hundreds of additional acres in the valley. Tract’s 668-acre campus targets 400 megawatts and draws on the same aquifer. Rocky Mountain Power’s transmission corridors for the Tract buildout will cross Cedar Valley ranch land under new easements.

The Utah Geological Survey models the Cedar Valley basin as already stressed, and hydrologists who study the Jordan River watershed have documented that Cedar Valley groundwater withdrawals reduce inflow to the Jordan River and ultimately to the Great Salt Lake, whose elevation has fallen to historic lows, threatening the lake ecosystem and the air quality of the Wasatch Front through windblown mineral dust. The Utah Rivers Council launched the 4,200 Project and the Great Salt Lake Waterkeeper to connect basin-level groundwater withdrawals to the lake’s declining elevation.

The essay under this county documents the Meta campus and the Tract buildout, the aquifer-to-lake hydrology, and the organizing by the Utah Rivers Council, Bridgerland Audubon, and the Alliance for a Better Utah at the Utah Public Service Commission.