cc >> Tom Zinnen: Welcome,
everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
My name is Tom Zinnen. I work here at the Biotechnology
Center at UW-Madison. I also work for UW Extension
Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those organizations
and our sponsors, Wisconsin Public Television,
Wisconsin Alumni Association, the UW Madison Science Alliance
and the PLATO group, thanks for coming to Wednesday Nite
at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday
night, 50 times a year. Tonight I'm delighted to be able
to introduce to you, Bruce Brown who is a colleague of mine who
also works for the cooperative extension.
He works for the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History
Survey here in town. He gets to work on one of the
more interesting and soon to be, well, I think it's fair to say
it's rather controversial, the whole issue of frac sands here
in Wisconsin. So please join me in welcoming
Bruce Brown to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
[APPLAUSE]
Bruce Brown: Thank you very much.
I'm quite pleased to see the size of the crowd we've got
tonight. Apparently this is an issue that
has caught a few people's attention.
I was rather fearing for a while that a talk about sand was about
the last thing anybody was going to want to hear.
But if you have at least paid any attention to the newspapers
or listened to any of the media, you can't help but have heard
about various controversy about hydrofracking and the production
of oil and natural gas and about the fact that we've really
undergone something very much akin to a gold rush in western
Wisconsin in this last year in terms of companies coming in and
opening up mines to get the type of sand that they need for
hydrofracking. And I'm going to try to give you
an idea tonight a little bit about why are they coming here.
Why is our resource particularly better than elsewhere?
I'm going to start with the basic process of frac sand, a
little bit about what the characteristics of good material
are, why Wisconsin is a major target, explain a bit about the
geology of the state that has helped form this particular
material and then go into a few of the issues that have come up
in local zoning and in the counties coping with this huge
influx. A lot of counties out in western
Wisconsin basically were, their non-metallic mining regulation
program was basically five or six big old hilltop limestone
quarries, and that's about all they had to deal with.
A county like Trempealeau suddenly has 20 applications for
hydrofrac sand mines, and this has basically overwhelmed them
and needless to say it's kept me pretty busy.
So I'm going to start out with basically looking at what is
hydrofracking and how do you hydrofrac a well.
Well, the principles of hydrofracking are shown down
here in the lower left. You have an oil well or a gas
well. In the past, the basic
technology was to vertical drill, and hydrofracking is not
something that's new. This is a technology that's been
around since just post-World War II, since the 1940s.
Basically, it was a vertical drill hole, they would pump down
pressure, fracture the formation a bit to help oil flow in.
It was a useful technique for secondary recovery of oil and
worked very well. Now the thing that is the new
development in the last few years is horizontal drilling.
We've got technology today, all of you have seen these little
rigs that they drill in cables for putting in fiber optics or
whatever else, but they can drill horizontally and follow
pretty closely on a straight line.
Well, these oil drillers that are currently developing the gas
fields and oil fields where we're using most the hydrofrac
sand, they can drill out a mile almost horizontally.
So that gives them a chance to go right out through the
formation and then they frac the formation by pumping down very
high pressure fluids, a mixture of a number of things, water
being the major ingredient with some polymers in there to help
keep the sand in suspension, but all these trucks up here, if you
see in this upper photo, these are all big compressor rigs from
oil field service companies, all hooked in tandem to a well which
is somewhere here in the middle. Most of these big trailers out
here that you see on the outside are filled up with sand which is
the hydrofrac sand. Have I got a mic that's not
working here?
All right, well that's a fair trade.
[LAUGHTER] To me it doesn't sound
much different. But anyway, what we have
up here, a bunch of compressor trucks.
These are all hooked in tandem pumping a very high pressure in
this formation down here to the point where it actually
fractures the rock around the borehole.
It will break that rock up, which is usually a very what we
call a tight shale. Shale is a very fine grained
rock. Most of our oil and gas in the
past was produced out of sandstone which is very porous
and easy to extract the material from, but the shale is very high
in hydrocarbon but it doesn't have any interconnected porosity
so there's no way to get it out. And they create that porosity by
the hydrofrac process. As soon as they get that pumped
up, they start injecting the sand and the fluids down there.
Basically what happens is sand goes out, goes into these cracks
and when they back the pressure off, shut down those
compressors, the sand stays out there and holds those cracks
open. You hear the term proppant used
every once and a while for hydrofrac sand and that's
exactly what it means. It props open those cracks.
Once they've let the pressure off, the controversial issue is
you get a lot of fluid that comes back out of here, there's
the big fluid ponds you can see over here, that will take on a
lot of formation water and some of the material that's pumped
down in before they can actually produce the gas.
So what makes a good hydrofrac sand?
Well, this is the kind of thing that they're looking for.
These grains are almost perfectly spherical.
Very round, well-rounded as we say.
Almost entirely pure quartz. Very few, some have a little bit
of iron staining on them but generally this stuff is almost
perfectly clean, fine, even sized.
There are some very tight specifications in terms of size
gradation for different types of applications, but basically what
they want is this good clean, pure, very round quartz so it
won't hang up going out there into the cracks and the other
thing is it has to have a very high compressive strength
because when the pressure is left off and those pores tend to
close up, they'll crush a grain that isn't high compressive
strength.
So here is what an ideal frac well would look like.
It has a surface up here, maybe go down probably in this case
6,000 to 8,000 feet where they're doing the fracking.
In many bases it's down to 15,000 feet or more.
Why? That's one of the reason they
need the high compressive strength.
The problems that have developed with hydrofracking, we've heard
a lot of it in the news about contamination of surface
aquifers, you see this little insert here shows the well head,
and basically, key to the hole thing, and you can imagine if
you're going to pump up a lot of pressure in here, you've got to
have that well very well constructed.
It's got to have a good casing and it's got to be well cemented
in. You can't have a problem.
You know what happens when you have a poor cement job, you get
a blow out like the well in the Gulf of Mexico last year, and
you can also get cases where this stuff leaks up around the
casing and can contaminate some water aquifers.
Chances are from the very deep depths you're not going to be
fracking all the way up to where you're going to actually
encounter that aquifer formation near the surface, but the chance
of well failure is a lot greater.
So it's a very important part of the whole thing is to make sure
that these wells are constructed properly.
So, where is the shale gas and oil?
Well, here is a map that was done by the Department of Energy
that basically shows you the regions in the US where we've
had or have these tight shales that are very rich in
hydrocarbon, usually natural gas but also oil as well.
There's a big basin out here in the Appalachians and this is the
area of the Marcellus shale and Utica shale.
There's a few other small ones in the east but the big ones are
like the Barnett down in Texas and Barnett and Woodford out in
west Texas and into New Mexico. The Bakken shale up in North
Dakota is a huge play, lots of formerly unrecoverable
hydrocarbons up here and a number of others out in the
Rocky Mountain basin. These are the areas where most
of this material gets used. To give you an idea just how big
this whole thing is, a colleague of mine from the DNR who is
their point man on frac sand sent this to me the other day,
and it's a satellite image. It's kind of neat.
You can see the aurora up here and everything.
Minneapolis, Minnesota, is over here.
You can see the towns along the highways.
This would be I94, Bismarck, this would be Fargo, probably
Winnipeg up here. You get this huge area of light
out here, light pollution basically.
That's all the lights from the oil and gas rigs in the Bakken
shale play. I've saw this thing and I
thought this is absolutely amazing.
Look at the size of that area. But I've had a couple friends
that I know who have traveled out there through North Dakota
this summer and they say it's just crazy.
There's trucks all over the place.
There's drill rigs. It's a huge venture that's going
on right now. Well, flip back out here at the
east, probably if you've watched any place in the news and heard
about problems with hydrofracking, it's out here in
what they call the Marcellus shale which is in the western
part of Pennsylvania, southwestern part of New York.
But I think you can see one thing that's very obvious on
here is that in some areas like in New York this stuff is
shallowing up to where the actual, these are contours on
the base of the Marcellus are up to around 3,000 feet.
When you're getting 3,000 feet and less, then you're getting
into the realm where I think you can possibly start getting some
problems from the actual fracking material or from the
hydrofracking itself relieving pressure by getting up into
formations that can be potentially water bearing.
So this is the areas that they've really had to take a
second look at it there's been a lot of study and is a lot of
study going on with the Department of Energy and EPA and
with the state geological surveys out east to see what
they can do about getting this better regulated because the
process, although it's a good one and we've been using it for,
as I say, a lot of years, it may not be exactly suitable
everywhere that we have the shale conditions that you can
recover oil from. It's not much of a problem when
you're out there in those big, deep basins, but it may be some
problems in areas like the east. Now here is another example.
This is from that Bakken shale out in North Dakota.
And you can see this is basically what happens.
They drill a whole series of these horizontal borings in the
petroleum bearing or gas bearing strata away from a single well
head, and then once they frac these things, they're on about a
1300-foot spacing, and they frac for a radius of about 500 feet
right around each bore hole here.
And that's enough to increase the porosity to get a whole lot
more recovered. The thing about this is this
isn't to scale. If you look over here, actually
you're looking at, this is 10,000 feet down below the
surface that they're doing the fracking up there in North
Dakota. But this is basically how it's
done and what the process is all about.
So now let's get into the frac sand and where does it come from
and why are we here in Wisconsin looking for it.
Where is the best frac sand? Well, I wonder if you can guess
what color I've used to show that.
[LAUGHTER] Basically, I took the
US geologic map, manipulated it a bit with an arc map, put the
Cambrian sandstone, it's a very mature, about 500-man-year-old
Cambrian age sandstone in red. Good deal up here in Wisconsin,
western Wisconsin, and over here into Minnesota, a little bit
down around the Ozarks and there's some scattered areas out
in the Appalachians, but basically a lot of these others
are not extensive or they're quartzitic, they're a little
tightly cemented and you can't really make good sand out of
them. The best of the stuff is right
here from Minnesota River Valley over through all of western
Wisconsin. This is what's gotten their
interest. So, again, the best stuff out
there is very pure quartz, very highly rounded, good, in this
case, very, these are nice, almost spherical grains.
This stuff is a little bit less rounded, probably from a younger
aged sand. Maybe a couple hundred man years
old Cretaceous age or something like that.
Generally doesn't have the level of maturity what we call, and it
also has possibly rack-rock fragments in it.
Glacial sand, we've got lots of in Wisconsin associated with
glacial deposits, is absolutely unsuitable to use for frac sand
because it's full of all kinds of stuff.
The grains are angular. There's all kinds of rock
fragments. There's all kinds of impurities
and materials in here that wouldn't hold the crushing
strength. It's not usable at all.
So basically the eastern half of the state, the glacial deposits,
I get asked every once in a while by counties over there,
are we going to have frac sand companies coming in to look
around. I say, nope, you're going to be
pretty safe. But the western part, there
you're in trouble. And this area of Minnesota is
less desirable than Wisconsin. I had a call from one of my
colleagues at the Minnesota Geological Survey not too long
ago, and he was asking what's all the deal over there in
Wisconsin, we're not really having all that much?
But there's two things: a couple of our major formations over
here in Wisconsin, which I'll talk about in a few minutes, are
buried a little too deeply over in Minnesota, and also the main
formations like the St. Peter and the Wonewoc are
covered by glacial deposits over here west of the river.
The advantage that we have in Wisconsin is that much of the
most desirable material is in what we call the driftless area,
or the area that the glaciers never actually covered.
So it's right there at the surface.
It's very easy to mine. You don't have to worry about a
lot of overburden.
So, here's the stratigraphic column in Wisconsin, aged to the
different rocks. We go from Precambrian rocks
down here at about three billion years all the way up to
Devonian, our youngest rocks, over in the Milwaukee area.
But our sands come from the lower part of the section down
here basically. Mostly in the Cambrian, there's
the Wonewoc sandstone, which is a good, very pure quartz
sandstone and the Jordan sandstone, and the Jordan
sandstone at the top of the Cambrian, which is just under
the Prairie du Chien limestone. And then we have the St.
Peter sandstone, which is slightly younger and occurs
throughout much of southern Wisconsin and southwestern
Wisconsin, but we're also seeing a little bit of interest grow in
the Mt. Simon sandstone, which is at the
very base of the section. And this is also a very mature
sandstone. Why are these such good, pure
sandstones? Basically, there was a huge,
long period of weathering that occurred on the continent after
the end of Precambrian time from about a billion years ago to
around 500 million years when the continent was flooded and
the Cambrian sands were deposited.
And there was no vegetation around at the time, very intense
weathering, this stuff got kicked around, blown around,
washed around by streams. Most of the unstable rock
fragments, unstable minerals all were destroyed in the time and
you were left with nothing but the most durable stuff which is
good, pure quartz and it was nicely rounded.
So that's the stuff that got incorporated into the Cambrian
sands, and that's the stuff that we've even got a little bit of
it as late at the St. Peter. But that's what the sand
industry is interested in. So let's start up in the north,
and I'll show you a little bit of what we're looking at.
This is in Barron County in northwestern Wisconsin.
The Jordan sandstone is shown in here in an orange color.
Up in this area and in the northern part of Chippewa County
where we've had probably 10 or 15 different operations try to
locate in the last year, half a dozen or more in Barron County,
they're interested in mining this Jordan sandstone because
it's very coarse, it will meet what's called the 20/40 size
gradation which is about the coarsest of the frac sands, and
it's exposed right near the surface.
Even though this area is glaciated, there is a lot of
exposure near the surface, and you don't have a cap over the
top of the Prairie du Chien limestone which is shown over
here in the blue color. So there's quite a bit of
interest in development up here. One of the keys which I'll talk
about quite a bit during the talk is transportation.
This is a rail line coming down here.
I don't know that it's complete all the way to Chippewa Falls
anymore. They may have abandoned some of
it. This section that has been
abandoned out here west of Cameron and Barron, the DOT is
actually talking about funding rebuilding that track out as far
as Almena just to serve about three or four major sand mines
that are going in out in the western part of Barron County.
So, let's take a look. The geology in pre-boom
production sites in west central Wisconsin looks something like
this. This is a map that I worked on
back in the 1980s. We had, up until a couple years
ago, only three or four operations out there.
We had two old mines over here along the river at Maiden Rock
and at Bay City in Pierce County.
And these were mines that mined the Jordan formation
underground. They actually went in through a
tunnel driven into the side of the bluff along the Mississippi
River and mined the material out underground by what we called
room and pillar method. And that way they could just get
the very desirable, very coarse member of the Jordan.
Other areas we had up in the north, Fairmount Minerals who
came in and bought out these two old mines down here, started a
new plant a year or two ago, or probably three or four years
now, up in Menomonie. And they're in this other
formation shown in red which is called the Wonewoc.
This is the Wonewoc formation in red.
The Jordan that I pointed out is in the gold color.
If you notice, there's not as much area of Jordan.
That's because it's a steep cliff former and forms long in
the bluffs or on the steep sides of valleys and it's very
inaccessible except to go in underground.
Whereas, a lot of surface exposure of the Wonewoc and
that's the target a lot of the companies are looking at.
Badger Mining Company, which has been in business for Wisconsin
for years and years, has a large mine over at Taylor in Jackson
County. And this one has been there for
about 30 years, and it produces a lot of frac sand plus foundry
sand and various other industrial sand products.
But that was where we were probably five years ago.
But this gives you an idea of what the geology is out in the
area that they're basically looking.
The Mt. Simon sandstone is shown in the
light tan color, and we're seeing a lot of interest in that
down in the area around Tomah and Black River Falls where this
material has been very heavily weathered and it's in part
alluvial material as well as a bedrock material and it's being
exploited as a waste product from cranberry bog development.
It's being bought up by the frac sand miners.
But basically most of the new mines that you hear about are
going in areas like Buffalo and Trempealeau County are in this
Wonewoc. Here's a little closer look at
it. Badger in Taylor.
There's now a brand new mine called Winn Bay Sands put in by
a Canadian company down here at Blair in Trempealeau County.
The one good advantage that these two operations have is
they're located on what was the old Green Bay and western
railroad route which goes down and connects with the northern
Santa Fe along the Mississippi. So they do have rail shipping
access. That's a very important thing as
far as moving a bulk commodity like this.
What's Wonewoc sandstone look like?
It's fairly impressive and outcrops many places.
If you've driven down, this is highway 14, junction with 35
right south of La Crosse. That corner, this is all Wonewoc
in this section. It's a very pure, if you go up
and pick out a handful of it or break some of it as you can in
this road cut which is just to the east on I90 over near west
Salem, you can just pick this stuff up and break it up.
It's friable enough that you can break it up with your hand, and
it looks like just little tiny marbles if you look at it
through a hand lens. But this is what the Wonewoc
looks like. It's capped over on top by what
we call the a tunnel city formation which is a very fine
grained what we call glauconitic sandstone.
Has a lot of phosphatic material in it.
This material actually is a very good material if you don't have
too much of it to give you problems.
It's overburden is very good to use in your reclamation of a
mine that you're trying to take out the Wonewoc.
One of the best examples of a mine of the Wonewoc is the
Badger operation in Taylor which, as I said, has been in
business for many years. This is an old photo.
If you take a look at it today, there's about twice as many
buildings in here. One thing this operation has
done, it's been here for many, many years, it's won many awards
for reclamation, they've done a very good job of restoring the
site. What they basically do in their
mining operation is they wash this stuff down in a sump.
They basically will bulldoze it or rip it because it's very
soft. They don't have to blast much on
it. Wash it down into a sump, pump
it up in a slurry to the top of a tower like this where it goes
through a process of washing through different screens and
sieves and then it's dewatered in a series of a cyclone
dewaterers down at the bottom and that's how they sort and
classify the sand. The Jordan sandstone is another
important formation out in western Wisconsin.
A little bit younger than the Wonewoc.
This is the Jordan right below the Prairie du Chien limestone.
This is in a cut south of the town of Arcadia over in
Trempealeau County. Jordan is a very good material,
has the coarsest sand in it, highly desirable but you can
have generally a good cap of limestone on top that, unless
that's been quarried away as it has part way in this case, you
have a hard time getting at that material unless you go in from
an underground. And a lot of the sand companies
are very, very leery of dealing with underground mining even
though we've had a couple successful operations for 40
years over in Pierce County. Problems you can get into in
there. You can get cement.
This is a silica cemented area within that.
That's just as hard as the quartz site up at Baraboo.
And if you run into this kind of material in a sand mine, this is
going to give you no end of grief.
And I'm very surprised that a lot of companies that I'm aware
of that have come in and started looking and prospecting for sand
in western Wisconsin, you'll ask them and they haven't done much
drilling, they haven't done much evaluation work.
They've just gone in here, look for unzoned town, basically,
where they don't have to go through a lot of hassle, bought
up property and gone to the county to get their reclamation
permit which is required under law, and otherwise started out
and are digging sand and hauling it down to Minnesota or wherever
they've got a rail connection and mining it without really
thinking too much about that. And I think we're going to have
some in for a surprise one of these days.
This is the underground mine in the Jordan over at Maiden Rock
in Pierce County. The old mine at Bay City, which
was recently reopened, was closed for a while and
abandoned, and what they did basically was put in a culvert
pipe with grading on there, and bats love to go in and hibernate
in these things. And the bats are in here in the
active mine down at Maiden Rock at the time.
They go back off into corners that no one, where there's not
much operation. It doesn't seem to bother them a
bit. But basically the entire
operation is carried on underground in here, in terms of
the wet sieving process classification.
It's pumped out in a series of pipes to the dry plant which is
a drying kiln located right out here.
To add it back into the mine is right back in here.
If you go down, especially to this place again today, you'll
see there's all kind of buildings around.
It's expanded considerably since the boom started.
But it's dried in this area in a kiln.
And there's a conveyor system that takes it right under
highway 35 where they can load directly on to the northern
Santa Fe. So sand producing areas in
western counties, let's just kind of sum this up.
We've got Bay City and Maiden Rock, two old underground mines
over here. One up in Menomonie.
Taylor and the Wonewoc down at Jackson County.
We also have a big mine located up near where the power plant is
just south of Portage. It's owned by the Unimin
Corporation. Portage and the Menomonie mines
both are in Wonewoc, and the Wonewoc has a little more finer
material in it but it's also very pure quartz.
So they've been able, in both of these mines, to partner with
Cardinal Glass Company, which is a major glass producer, has a
plant in Portage and also one up in Menomonie, the material they
can't use for hydrofrac sand, they can sell to the glass
company. It's used as a basis for making
glass.
The other formation that's starting to show a little bit of
interest is the Mt. Simon sandstone.
And I'm a little bit surprised at this.
This is the base of Mt. Simon right here, resting on the
Precambrian, which is weathered granite, up at Chippewa Falls.
Much of the lower part of Mt. Simon is full the clay streaks,
it's got very pebbly material in it, but basically is pure enough
quartz that they can sort this stuff out by the sieving process
and whatever and concentrated material that they can use for
sand. And once you get farther beyond
the edge of the outcrop area of the Wonewoc, sort of up into
central Wisconsin, this is the formation that's available to
use. And when you hear about
operations up in Wood County and areas like that, northern Clark
County, they're in the Mt. Simon.
Another type of operation that we're seeing and started a
couple years ago, basically this is a processing plant over in
the Tomah area, and you can see these if you drive up highway 94
and you look north, about Oakdale and that area, you'll
see these great big piles of sand, big piles of white sand.
And a lot of this stuff is actually from waste material
produced by cranberry growers. As they're expanding their
cranberry bogs and they're excavating out these big ponds
for water storage, they're coming up with a lot of sand.
Well, a smart entrepreneur from Texas came up here from a
company called Proppant Specialists, and he decided I
could go in and buy this sand, I wouldn't have to mine it so I
wouldn't have to worry about getting any kind of permits to
mine, I wouldn't have to deal with mine safety and MSHA, and I
wouldn't even have to get a NR 135 reclamation permit because
I'm just buying agricultural waste here.
And so he set up a plant and actually all the major producers
in the state at the time hated him for it but it's a pretty
good business plan. It's kind of clever.
They still are producing a lot of sand out of this.
And this is in part alluvial material and it's in part
bedrock material. It would be Mt. Simon
bedrock in this area, but if you look around some of the
high hills in there, like the bluffs you see up at Camp
Douglas area and around there, these are big bluffs of
Galesville or Wonewoc sandstone, and they're sitting out there on
a plain of Mt. Simon, and this stuff was all
reworked and weathered during the glacial times when that area
was filled with Glacial Lake Wisconsin.
And Glacial Lake Wisconsin on the eastern side, the sands over
in, say, Portage, Adams County, that area, are all full of
glacial material and not suitable, but since this stuff
is all locally derived and is right there and is already very
much disaggregated soft material, it's a natural for
development. And we've had probably about
five or six companies come in looking at developing sand mines
and plants within using this type of material in particularly
the area of Monroe County. So let's take a look at the
St. Peter sandstone. This is the youngest of the
bunch. The St. Peter in our area
up here is a little bit finer grain than it
is in areas like down in Illinois.
It hasn't really received much interest as far as being used
for frac sand. The big production areas are
over here in Green Lake County. There used to be several old
abandoned operations. There's a big one, Badger's
Fairwater plant over here at a place called Utley near
Fairwater on the border with Fond du Lac County.
There's Gelhar Company has a mine at Markesan.
There's a number of old abandoned foundry sand
operations west of New Glarus and down near Hanover in Rock
County.
Out here west of Madison and Dane County, there was a large
foundry sand mine out there. But a lot of St. Peter
is exposed down here in the southern part of the state.
In general, the interest in St. Peter has been, as I say, for a
foundry sand because it's not coarse enough grain and it
doesn't have quite as much compressive strength as the
Cambrian sands so it's not as suitable for a frac sand, but
they're having, right now, a shortage of foundry sands
because many of the producers in other areas that could convert
over to producing frac sand because the market has been so
hot in the last year have given up on production of foundry
sand. So we're really getting a lot of
demand for foundry sand over in this part of the state.
A number of companies are looking at expanding their
resources. And you wonder, well, with a
down economy, why is there such a big deal for foundry sand?
We're the manhole cover capitol of the world here in Wisconsin.
You see all the Nina Foundry and Brillion Iron Works out there on
every manhole and drain out there in the streets.
But basically one of the company people was telling me that
companies like Oshkosh Truck that have gotten these big
multimillion dollar contracts from the government to produce
armored vehicles and such for the military are using a lot of
castings, and that's one of the sources that there's a shortage
of actual good foundry sand on the market right now.
So St. Peter, this is what St. Peter
basically looks like. Down in Iowa County you can see
these big bluffs in a lot of places.
Down south of Madison it's believed that it was actually a
dune sand. Aeolian origin in some areas in
here. You'll see these very big broad
cross beds. Generally, the St. Peter
is a very soft material. You can walk up to an outcrop,
pull it out. It's frosted very, it looks like
sugar when you pick it up. Very fine grained and very
rounded. But it doesn't quite have the
characteristics for frac sand that the old Cambrian sandstones
do. One of our bigger operations of
the St. Peter is up at the Badger
Fairwater plant. Basically, there they're doing
entirely hydraulic mining. They basically push sand or
disaggregated St. Peter sandstone down into a sump
and suck it up the same way as they do over at Taylor, pump
that up to a plant where it goes through and is processed and
then put into stockpiles and shipped for delivery primarily
to the foundry industry. St. Peter
is a very difficult formation to work, whereas over
in the west, the Jordan and the Wonewoc are fairly uniform
thickness. The St. Peter
can go, it was formed in channels that were cut into the
underlying Prairie du Chien limestone, and it can actually
vary from nothing here in this quarry down at Markesan in
southern Green Lake County. This is a Prairie du Chien
formation down here. Platteville formation above.
That little rusty sort of line horizon in there is St. Peter.
Five miles north of there this is the AF Gelhar Sand plant and
mine just north of Markesan, and he has over 200 feet of material
here that he's mining for foundry sand.
Once you get down to the base of the St. Peter,
it's pretty easy to tell when you're running out of it
because you get into a very red shale which is just reworked
material from that weathering surface on the top of the
Prairie du Chien before the St. Peter was actually deposited.
So, what are the prospects for sand mining in south western
Wisconsin? Right now I'm getting ready for
Friday. I'm going down for a meeting
with the Lower Wisconsin Riverway Commission is having a
meeting down in Spring Green in which we're going to talk about
potential for sand development down here in the lower Wisconsin
valley. The Jordan is exposed in a lot
of the bluffs along these valleys by Boscobel, areas stuff
as that. St. Peter is shown in that dark
green color, potential is still down there.
One good thing about it, they have the service of that
Wisconsin central line that goes west of Madison down to bridge
port along the river, and this has been a key to getting people
thinking about development. There's other issues down here
in terms of preserving the riverway and various aesthetic
issues, and I'm not sure just where this is going to go, but
there have been some serious inquiries from some companies as
to what the resources are down here and a number of landowners
have been approached. Much of the area of south
western Wisconsin, which exposes a lot of St. Peter
sandstone in many of the valleys down here in the
Kickapoo and Platte Rivers and various others, is not
accessible because the railroads basically ended in, used to have
rails through much of that area but it ends at Monroe at this
time. I wouldn't doubt that there
would be some interest in development, say, in Rock and
eastern Green County. Taking a closer look at Iowa
County. This is map recently completed.
There's Lone Rock, Spring Green. The Jordan outcrop is shown.
Everything else has been shown in the tan color here in the
rest of the formation. The Jordan outcrop area is shown
in that red color which indicates there's a lot of it
available up to down these valleys.
And once you get on top, the St. Peter is shown in the green.
So there's definitely potential resource down there.
So let's look at some of the issues that surround sand mining
today and just where we're going with it.
Some of the advantages that you can't ignore: local jobs and
economic growth. There's probably an average of
20 people associated or more with working in one of these
mines, 20-30 jobs. Quite a lot of jobs in the
construction industry right now, particularly up in Chippewa
Valley and areas like that and constructing some of the bigger,
newer plants. The demand for natural gas as a
clean fuel, I think, is going to be around for a while.
The time it will take us to phase out petroleum, even with
our best intentions, if we want to get away from petroleum based
fuels, I don't care what you say, we're not going to be able
to do it overnight, and there's going to be an interest to
develop our own resources here. So I think, number one, the
increasing use of natural gas as a fuel for generation of
electricity to replace coal is something that we've got not a
whole lot of choices, burn more coal, build more nukes, whatever
else, but gas has proven to be a good, clean fuel.
We're looking 5-10 years ago at importing liquified petroleum
gas from the Middle East. Today, with this technology and
some of those basins out in the west, we have the potential of
actually being self-sufficient in terms of our natural gas
supply.
Wisconsin has a hundred-year-plus history of
industrial sand mining. We've been mining sand, as I
say, for the foundry industry probably since the mid-19th
century with very few environmental or any other kind
of problems. And when we compare sand mining
to other types of mining, basically industrial sand mining
has a minimum environmental impact.
Sand mines are among the easier types of operations to reclaim.
If you've heard a little bit about the iron mine proposed up
north, that would be a definite contrast in terms of ease of
reclamation, but sand mining, basically, are fairly easy to
reclaim back into agricultural land or wild life habit,
whatever, and reclamation is now required by law in Wisconsin.
There's no way that you can mine without ultimately reclaiming.
Potential problems and issues that are out there, and you hear
these raised a lot. Groundwater usage and potential
for groundwater contamination.
You hear various concerns about the amount of water that some of
these operations use to process the sand.
As I'll say a little bit later, they're very efficient in terms
of how they recycle the water. Air quality is an issue that
there's been a lot of information and a lot of
misinformation put out about. Fugitive dust, risk from
breathing crystalline silica, these are all real things to
consider, but I think in the end we'll find they're very minor
when compared to other issues involved.
A huge one, which nobody really anticipated and has caused an
awful lot of concern, particularly political concern
among the town associations, county associations, various
local governments, is truck traffic.
Up until this time, all of our big operations, Badger,
operations over along the river, the underground mines, the mines
up in the east in the St. Peter have all been based on the
rail and rail transport. Now we're looking at a lot of
operations in places like Chippewa and Barron County where
they build a centralized plant and are going to truck this
material in from a series of different mines out here.
And there's a large plant by a company called EOG that's just
been built on the north side of Chippewa Falls, and they're
anticipating a truck a minute hauling into that plant during
their producing season. It's going through a roundabout,
one of my favorite traffic control devices, on the north
side of Chippewa Falls at highway 124 and S. And this is
going to be one a minute of these trucks going in there and
empties coming back. This is posing problems that
we've never had to deal with before which is one thing that's
going to be a lot of concern. Blasting and potential damage,
everybody's worried about that, but there's very little blasting
involved in sand mining. Noise levels, hours of
operation, these are things that where you do have zoning are
dealt with in the conditional use permit.
Reclamation and subsequent land use, there's always some
disagreements about that but there's no disagreement about
reclamation because reclamation is a requirement by law in the
state of Wisconsin. Any property before it can be
even opened and started is required to have a reclamation
plan in place. So how serious are the problems
and how do we deal with them? Groundwater use, DNR regulates
high capacity wells very closely, and high capacity wells
are wells that draw anything more than 70 gallons a minute.
This includes most industrial wells and irrigation wells, such
things as that. Permits are required to get a
fairly extensive review. I took part in a program up in
Barron County talking to their board and Laura Lynch from the
DNR who does a lot of the approval work gave a very good
summary of the procedures that go through and evaluating the
effects on trout streams and surface water and whatever else
in their municipal water supplies, so there's quite a bit
of review that goes into the water process.
When you look at it, I was involved up in Dune County and
permitting the original mine east of Menomonie and people
were looking out there and saying if this thing goes in
there, they're going to dry up everything we've got, they're
going to take all of our water. And you can see out from the
window probably about eight big center pivot irrigation wells
out there. And I said every time a farmer
turns one of those on, he's going to be using more water in
an hour than these guys are going to use in probably a day
or more or closer to a week's time.
But anyway, impact of private wells, this is something that
always an issue, it's an issue with aggregate mining, whatever
you're doing. We've had very good success in
the aggregate industry with companies and especially the
larger companies that come in who'll agree to do a well survey
and basically guarantee the water supply for their closer
neighbors. If something goes wrong that
they cause their water supply to dry up or they contaminate it or
whatever, they'll drill them a new well.
This time of arrangement has really worked very successfully.
We've had a number of cases over in eastern Wisconsin with deep
limestone mines. This has worked quite well.
And when you think about it when a company comes in and is going
to invest millions of dollars in a operation like this, it's a
very small amount to avoid future problems with your
neighbors. Water quality, where runoff and
surface water impact is regulated by the DNR just like
it is for any other kind of construction site or mining
operation. Sand mining really doesn't have
much more potential for groundwater impact than a
limestone quarry or a gravel pit.
It's just maybe a larger scale operation but in terms of any
kind of nasty materials that are used or anything, not much
difference. One issue that's of some concern
is the potential contamination from flocculants that are used
in the settling ponds because one of the things they do is
they recycle a lot of their water and they have to settle
out the fines. So they add flocculants, I think
it's polyacrylamides, and nobody is really quite sure where this
stuff goes or what happens to it.
There's no specific regulations on it.
But there's never been any problems on record with it, and
if you think about it, many of those same chemicals, if you
drink Milwaukee's water, that's the same thing they're using in
that to basically settle out the sediment.
Air quality issues are something that's really gotten to be a big
issue in western Wisconsin. One thing about it, frac sand
requires clean, round, unbroken grains.
Process involves disaggregation and screening.
It's usually done wet rather than any kind of grinding or
crushing operation because the last thing you want to do is
break grains, make them angular, then their not going to meet
your specks. Frac sand plant will produce
probably less angular crystalline silica dust than a
quarry that crushes quartzite, say up at Baraboo or anywhere
like that, or a gravel pit for that matter that dry crushes
fairly coarse cobble material and does it without any
particular dust control measures.
Most plants are just a matter of a lot of the processing, as I
say in the initial screening, is done wet in the first place.
There are standard ways to minimize dust which is very
important, good industry practices.
Such as watering them down haul roads, paving roads, spraying
conveyor belts, even installing wash baths for truck tires.
This is a very successful technique that we've seen used
in a lot of limestone quarries where tracking this dust
material out on to a highway or something and then having
traffic kick it up has caused all kind of problems.
They build a shallow pan, maybe eight inches deep full of water
that the trucks drive through, washes their wheels clean.
They have no problems with it. But the DNR is very fussy in
their air quality standards about controlling fugitive dust,
and complaints about these kinds of things will generally result
in the DNR coming in there and requiring some of these
techniques be used. Most major operators do this as
a matter of routine. For the actual workplace
conditions, Mine Safety Administration and OSHA have
very strict workplace standards and very tight restrictions on
how much particulate silica can be in a cubic meter of air in
the work environment. And if it's that clean at the
site, you're probably not going to have a whole lot of problems
at distances, although there's some probably necessary studies
to be done to collect some of that data.
Operating issues, really blasting, everybody is concerned
about it. It's regulating by the
Department of Commerce. If you've got a complaint,
that's where you go. Blasting is used only to loosen
material. I know of a number of companies
that have used it to break up rock and loosen it a bit and
then they go in there and basically drive a Cat back and
forth a few times and get the stuff broken up enough that they
can get it into the wash plant. But if it's too heavily cemented
to where you've got to use a lot of powder to blast it, it's not
even going to make specks for frac sand.
The traffic operating schedule, road maintenance, these things
are best handle on conditional use permit.
But the problem is that an awful lot of places that mining
companies will come into just because of the convenience have
no zoning. I was talking about a town's
association earlier this year and one of the executives there
was saying a lot of these towns used to be very militant about
this idea of we don't want zoning, we aren't going to have
anybody telling us what we're going to do for our land use.
We're not going to have anybody in here telling us we've got to
keep it all as prime agriculture, whatever.
But then as soon as somebody comes in and proposes a 500-acre
sand mine, they start to sing a little bit different tune.
But anyway, there's generally an opportunity to sit down,
particularly with many of the bigger companies, and make some
negotiations. Town of Howard up in Chippewa
County is very successful at this and there's several others
since that have done that. Reclamation.
People think that these outfits can walk away afterward if
something goes wrong. Reclamation is regulated under
NR 135 in the Department of Natural Resources.
Reclamation plan is subject to public comment and approval.
You've got to have a public hearing associated with it.
It is required to be submitted before you can ever turn a spade
of dirt at one of these operations, and a company has to
post financial assurance in the form of a bond that's an
irrevocable bond. You can't say, well, some other
creditor will take that when they go broke.
No, it has to be specifically set aside for reclamation so
that the county or the local government, whatever, is not
going to get stuck with the cost of cleaning up a site.
That has to be in place before any mining begins.
The good news is that we've had a hundred-year history of sand
mining with very few problems. Most environmental issues can be
dealt with under existing regulations and by using
existing technology and applying best industry standard
practices. Many new mines now, this is the
one that, as I said earlier, is really the problem that's
causing troubles out there, rely on truck transport.
This means traffic and safety issues, potential road
maintenance issues need to be resolved.
We're seeing some real progress among some of the western
counties. There's even some that are
trying to make an assessment on companies to help pay for the
road costs. But the DOT is also very
concerned about this too because it's putting a lot of extra wear
and loading on to state roads. So there's quite a bit being
done about this right now to work the issues out.
Operational issues can usually be resolved by the zoning or by
negotiation. And as new mines come into
production, I think the big thing is that we've just seen a
huge rush in the last year that's basically overwhelmed a
lot of the western counties and they haven't be able to really
keep up with it, but as some of these new mines come into
production, particularly some of the large ones up in the
Chippewa County area, the demand should be met and the pace of
development should slow down in time to work out the remaining
issues. One thing I might add at this
point is that Wisconsin is not the only place that does have
sand that is suitable for frac sand.
There is other sands of lesser qualities, and a number of
companies are pouring a lot of money into developing these
resources in areas like Texas and Oklahoma, which are actually
closer in some cases, transportation wise, to the
actual oil and gas fields. The difference is that most of
those sands are down there around 4,000 PSI or 6,000 PSI
crushing strength, and they can't meet the standards that we
have which go up as high as 12,000 and 14,000 for some of
the best of the sands from the Jordan formation in western
Wisconsin. But there's going to be a big
shake out in the industry, I predict, within the next year or
so because as this comes online, we're going to see, right now
you could go buy a farm out in Trempealeau County, Bubba's
Trucking and Excavating. He's got a back hoe and two or
three dump trucks. He can go out there, start
digging sand out of some farmer's backyard, hauling it
down to Winona, Minnesota, loading it on the Union Pacific
and selling it to a sand company down there that has a loading
facility, and that stuff is going down there and selling for
$300 or $400 a ton which at the wellhead which is pretty
amazing. Once they process it, they can
haul it down there, process it down in Texas and sell it at the
wellhead. Well, as soon as the supply
starts to come up, there's going to be some major changes in the
economics. We've got some huge capacity
being built into some of the big plants like EOG up in Chippewa
Falls, Winn Bay Sands in Trempealeau County, Badger has
put a lot in into expanding their capacity, and I think
we're going to see a settling out of the industry in the next
couple years. So what can we expect?
The sandstone formations in Wisconsin and Minnesota are the
best. Well, that's a fact of life.
It just happened to be because we've got the good stuff that's
available very easily and mineable at the surface.
As long as fracking is the best available technology, which
right now it is for producing previously unrecoverable natural
gas, frac sand mining is going to continue to be a big business
in our region. There's going to be a demand for
it. And I think that I'm not sure
what kind of technology will ever replace it, but the fact
that it has brought us from total dependence to almost
self-sufficiency on natural gas and it's released a tremendous
amount more petroleum that we won't be dependent on foreign
imports, I think there's going to be a demand for it for a
while, at least into the future. Interest in Wisconsin sands
growing but the boom took us by surprise.
Counties were overwhelmed with applications.
The scale is what really has presented problems that we
haven't dealt with before, like I mentioned early, the guy in
Trempealeau County had four or five little stone quarries to
deal with, now he finds he's got 20 sand mines.
But he's actually doing a very good job of dealing with it.
So conclusions that we can come to out of this, I'm going to
wrap it up here. Mother nature didn't give us any
of the oil and gas. We don't have any energy,
basically, in Wisconsin. We're strictly a consumer state.
But we did get the sand that's now exactly what they want and
need to produce what they could never produce before.
There's a few problems in the process, but I think ultimately
that will get worked out. It produces material very
efficiently. You think about back when I took
petroleum geology, you used to hear that we were only
recovering something like 20% of the potential from a particular
oil field. So we're really increasing our
efficiency and wasting less fuel.
Frac sand mining should really be continued as a strong a
stable industry as long as there's a demand for
hydrocarbons and we wish to reduce our dependence on
imports. And I think that's a goal that
everybody has. We would like to reduce our
dependence on hydrocarbons, but I think it's going to take us a
number of years, realistically, before we can really wean
ourselves completely away from it.
But I think the current boom is going to settle down as supply
catches up with demand. And this is going to happen, it
may happen as a pretty big event at the time because I think
we're going to see a lot of these little guys who are
producing, small producers out there, either being swallowed up
by the larger companies or they're going to be put out of
business because you can't afford the truck haul of hauling
this and paying for diesel fuel to haul this stuff by truck when
you have some large companies who had their own rail siding,
own their own cars and locomotives, they can basically
spot a 60-car unit train on there that the railroad just
comes and picks up and ships out.
And that's the way you get your best rates on shipping.
And any of this kind of stuff, the one big factor in there is
transportation. Efficient producers are going to
be some of the larger companies that have been in the business a
long time. We've got about three types of
companies. We've got the old time sand
companies like Unimin, US Silica, Badger Mining, Gelhar,
these people know what they're doing.
They've been in the business a long time.
We've got the carpetbaggers who've come in who are, in many
cases, oil companies who've tried to cut the middle man out,
and all they want to do is get their own source of sand.
They may or may not stay in that business, and then we've got all
the small guys out there who are making a killing right now
because of the high price for sand, but they're going to be
put out, I think, of business by the lack of access to rail.
The survivors are going to be the ones that can ship the
product efficiently, and that's going to be one of the major
factors. So with that, I will conclude.
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