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everyone, to Wednesday Nite >> Tomat the Lab.lcome,
My name is Tom Zinnen.
Center at UW-Madison. I I also work for UW Extensiongy
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
also works for the cooperative who is a colleague of mine who
He works for the Wisconsin extension.
Survey here in town. Geological and Natural History
more interesting and soon to be, He gets to work on one of the
it's rather controversial, the well, I think it's fair to say
in Wisconsin. So please join me in welcoming
Bruce Brown to Wednesday Nite at
[APPLAUSE]
Bruce Brown: Thank you very much.
I'm quite pleased to see the
tonight. size of the crowd we've got
has caught a few people's Apparently attention. issue that
I was rather fearing for a while
the last thing anybody was going that a talk about sand was about
But if you have at least paid any attention to the newspapers
or listened to any of the media,
about various controversy about hydrofracking and the production
of oil and natural gas and about
undergone something very much akin to a gold rush in western
Wisconsin in this last year in
opening up mines to get the type terms of companies coming in and
hydrofracking. of sand that they need for
an idea tonight a little bit And I'm going to try to give you
Why is our resource particularly about why are they coming here.
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
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
A county like Trempealeau suddenly has 20 applications for
hydrofrac sand mines, and this
and needless to say it's kept me has basically overwhelmed them
So I'm going to start out with pretty busy.
hydrofracking and how do you basically looking at what is
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
something that's new. This is a technology that's been
around since just post-World War
Basically, it was a vertical II, since the 1940s.
pressure, fracture the formation drill hole, they would pump down
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
whatever else, but they can drill horizontally and followr
pretty closely on a straight
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
formation and then they frac the go right out through the
high pressure fluids, a mixture fof a number of things, watery
being the major ingredient with some polymers in there to help
keep the sand in suspension, but
see in this upper photo, these all these trucks up here, if you
oil field service companies, all are all big compressor rigs from
is somewhere here in the middle. hooked in tandem to a well which
here that you see on the outside Most of these big trailers out
the hydrofrac sand. arHave I got a mic that's not is
working here?
All right, well that's a fair trade.
[LAUGHTER]
much different. But anyway, what we have
up here, a bunch of compressor
These are all hooked in tandem trucks.
this formation down here to the pumppoint where it actuallye in
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
and easy to extract the material sandstone which is very porous
in hydrocarbon but it doesn't have any interconnected porosity
so there's no way to get it out.
the hydrofrac process. And they create that porosity by
up, they start injecting the As soon as they get that pumped
Basically what happens is sand sand and the fluids down there.
and when they back the pressure goes ooff, shut down thosecracks
compressors, the sand stays out there and holds those cracks
open. You hear the term proppant used
every once and a while for
exactly what it means. hydrofrac sand and that's
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
So what makes a good hydrofrac produce the gas.
Well, this is the kind of thing that they're looking for.
These grains are almost perfectly spherical.
Very round, well-rounded as we
Almost entirely pure quartz. say.
of iron staining on them but Very few, some have a little bit
perfectly clean, fine, even generally thsized.ff is almost
There are some very tight specifications in terms of size
gradation for different types of
they want is this good clean, apure, very round quartz so itat
won't hang up going out there into the cracks and the other
thing is it has to have a very
because when the pressure is high compressive strength
close up, they'll crush a grain lethat isn't high compressive to
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
Why? 15,000 feet or more.
need the high compressive That's onestrength.eason they
The problems that have developed
a lot of it in the news about withcontamination of surfaceard
aquifers, you see this little insert here shows the well head,
and basically, key to the hole
you're going to pump up a lot of thing, and you can imagine if
have that well very well pressure in here, you've got to
It's got to have a good casing constructed.
in. andYou can't have a problem.nted
You know what happens when you
a blow out like the well in the hGulf of Mexico last year, andt
you can also get cases where
casing and can contaminate some this stwater aquifers.ound the
Chances are from the very deep
fracking all the way up to where depths you're not going to be
encounter that aquifer formation you're going to actually
of well failure is a lot near the surface, but the chance
So it's a very important part of greater.
that these wells are constructed the whole thing is to make sure
So, where is the shale gas and properly.
Well, here is a map that was oil?
that basically shows you the done by the Department of Energy
had or have these tight shales regions in the US where we've
hydrocarbon, usually natural gas that are very rich in
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
like the Barnett down in Texas in the east but the big ones are
west Texas and into New Mexico. anThe Bakken shale up in Northn
Dakota is a huge play, lots of
hydrocarbons up here and a formerly unrecoverable
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
their point man on frac sand of mine from the DNR who is
and it's a satellite image. sent tIt's kind of neat.r day,
You can see the aurora up here
Minneapolis, Minnesota, is over and ehere.hing.
You can see the towns along the highways.
This would be I94, Bismarck,
Winnipeg up here. You get this huge area of light
out here, light pollution basically.
That's all the lights from the
shale play. oiI've saw this thing and Iken
thought this is absolutely
Look at the size of that area. amazing.
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
about problems with hydrofracking, it's out here in
what they call the Marcellus
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
the base of the Marcellus are up actual, these are contours on
When you're getting 3,000 feet to around 3,000 feet.
into the realm where I think you and less, then you're getting
problems from the actual can possibly start getting some
hydrofracking itself relieving fracking material or from the
formations that can be pressure by getting up into
So this is the areas that they've really had to take a
second look at it there's been a
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
process, although it's a good one and we've been using it for,
as I say, a lot of years, it may
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,
problems in areas like the east. deep basins, but it may be some
This is from that Bakken shale Now here is another example.
And you can see this is basically what happens.
They drill a whole series of
petroleum bearing or gas bearing these horizontal borings in the
head, and then once they frac these things, they're on about a
1300-foot spacing, and they frac
right around each bore hole for a radiushere.bout 500 feet
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
surface that they're doing the 10,000 feet down below the
Dakota. But this is basically how it's
done and what the process is all
So now let's get into the frac about.
and why are we here in Wisconsin sand and where does it come from
Where is the best frac sand? looking for it.
what color I've used to show Well, I wonder if you can guess
[LAUGHTER] that.
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.
western Wisconsin, and over here Good deal up here in Wisconsin,
down around the Ozarks and into Minnesota, a little bit
in the Appalachians, but there's some scattered areas out
are not extensive or they're basically a lot of these others
tightly cemented and you can't quartzitic, they're a little
them. The best of the stuff is right
here from Minnesota River Valley
Wisconsin. over through all of western
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.
old Cretaceous age or something Maybe a coulike that.d man years
Generally doesn't have the level
also has possibly rack-rock of maturfragments in it., and 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
The grains are angular. There's all kinds of rock
fragments.
and materials in here that There's all kinds of impurities
strength. wIt's not usable at all.ng
So basically the eastern half of
I get asked every once in a twhile by counties over there,s,
are we going to have frac sand
around. I say, nope, you're going to be
pretty safe.
you're in trouble. But the western part, there
less desirable than Wisconsin. And this area of Minnesota is
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
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
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
It's very easy to mine. You don't have to worry about a
lot of overburden.
So, here's the stratigraphic
different rocks. column in Wisconsin, aged to the
down here at about three billion We go from Precambrian rocks
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 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
the Mt. Simon a lsandstone, which is at the in
very base of the section. And this is also a very mature
sandstone.
sandstones? WBasically, there was a huge,
long period of weathering that
the end of Precambrian time from occurred on the continent after
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
washed around by streams. kMost of the unstable rockd,
fragments, unstable minerals all
you were left with nothing but were destroyed in the time and
good, pure quartz and it was the most durable stuff which is
So that's the stuff that got nicely rounded.
sands, and that's the stuff that incorporated into the Cambrian
it as late at the St. Peter. we've even got a little bit of
industry is interested in. But that's what the sand
and I'll show you a little bit So let's start up in the north,
This is in Barron County in onorthwestern Wisconsin..
The Jordan sandstone is shown in
Up in this area and in the here in an orange color.
where we've had probably 10 or northern part of Chippewa County
locate in the last year, half a dozen or more in Barron County,
they're interested in mining
it's very coarse, it will meet this Jordan sandstone because
gradation which is about the what's called the 20/40 size
it's exposed right near the coarsest of surface. sands, and
Even though this area is
exposure near the surface, and glaciated, there is a lot of
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.
about quite a bit during the One of the keys which I'll talk
This is a rail line coming down talk is there.ortation.
I don't know that it's complete all the way to Chippewa Falls
anymore.
it. TheThis section that has beenof
abandoned out here west of
actually talking about funding Cameron and Barron, the DOT is
as Almena just to serve about rthree or four major sand minesr
that are going in out in the
So, let's take a look. western part of Barron County.
production sites in west central The geology in pre-boom
this. This is a map that I worked on
back in the 1980s.
ago, only three or four We haoperations out there.years
We had two old mines over here
and at Bay City in Pierce along the rCounty. Maiden Rock
And these were mines that mined the Jordan formation
underground.
tunnel driven into the side of They actually went in through a
River and mined the material out the bluff along the Mississippi
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
came in and bought out these two north, Fairmount Minerals who
new plant a year or two ago, or oprobably three or four yearsa
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
The Jordan that I pointed out is red.
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
inaccessible except to go in of valleys and it's very
Whereas, a lot of surface exposure of the Wonewoc and
that's the target a lot of the
Badger Mining Company, which has companies are looking at.
for years and years, has a large been in business for Wisconsin
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
But that was where we were industrial sand products.
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
down in the area around Tomah and Black River Falls where this
material has been very heavily
alluvial material as well as a weathered and it's in part
exploited as a waste product bedrock material and it's being
It's being bought up by the frac from cranberry bog development.
But basically most of the new mines that you hear about are
going in areas like Buffalo and Trempealeau County are in this
Wonewoc.
it. Here'sBadger in Taylor.look at
There's now a brand new mine
a Canadian company down here at caBlair in Trempealeau County.y
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
Santa Fe along the Mississippi. So they do have rail shippingn
access. That's a very important thing as
far as moving a bulk commodity
What's Wonewoc sandstone look lilike?is.
It's fairly impressive and
If you've driven down, this is outcrops many places.
right south of La Crosse. That corner, this is all Wonewoc
in this section.
and pick out a handful of it or break some of it as you can in
this road cut which is just to
Salem, you can just pick this thstuff up and break it up.est
It's friable enough that you can
it looks like just little tiny break it up with your hand, and
through a hand lens. marbles if you look at it
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
Has a lot of phosphatic material sandstone.
This material actually is a very in it.
too much of it to give you good material if you don't have
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
business for many years. which, as I said, has been in
If you take a look at it today, there's about twice as many
buildings in here.
done, it's been here for many, One thing this operation has
for reclamation, they've done a mvery good job of restoring thes
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
sieves and then it's dewatered through different screens and
dewaterers down at the bottom and that's how they sort and
classify the sand.
important formation out in The Jordan sandstone is another
A little bit younger than the westeWonewoc.nsin.
This is the Jordan right below
This is in a cut south of the the town of Arcadia over inone.
Trempealeau County. Jordan is a very good material,
has the coarsest sand in it,
have generally a good cap of highly desirable but you can
that's been quarried away as it has part way in this case, you
have a hard time getting at that
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.
there. Problems you can get into in
This is a silica cemented area You can get cement.
That's just as hard as the within that.
And if you run into this kind of quartz site up at Baraboo.
going to give you no end of material in agrief.mine, this is
And I'm very surprised that a lot of companies that I'm aware
of that have come in and started
in western Wisconsin, you'll ask looking and prospecting for sand
drilling, they haven't done much them and they haven't done much
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
and are digging sand and hauling law, and otherwise started out
they've got a rail connection itand mining it without reallyer
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
abandoned, and what they did closed for a while and
pipe with grading on there, and bats love to go in and hibernate
in these things.
active mine down at Maiden Rock And the baat the time.re in the
They go back off into corners that no one, where there's not
much operation. It doesn't seem to bother them a
bit.
operation is carried on underground in here, in terms of
the wet sieving process classification.
It's pumped out in a series of
a drying kiln located right out pipes to the here.lant which is
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
But it's dried in this area in a the boom started.
And there's a conveyor system that takes it right under
highway 35 where they can load
Santa Fe. dSo sand producing areas in
western counties, let's just
We've got Bay City and Maiden Rock, two old underground mines
over here.
Taylor and the Wonewoc down at One up in Menomonie.
We also have a big mine located up near where the power plant is
just south of Portage.
Corporation. It's owned by the Unimin
both are in Wonewoc, and the Portage and the Menomonie mines
material in it but it's also Wonewoc has a little more finer
So they've been able, in both of very pure quartz.
Cardinal Glass Company, which is these mines, to partner with
plant in Portage and also one up a major glass producer, has a
can't use for hydrofrac sand, in they can sell to the glassey
company.
It's used as glass.s for making
The other formation that's
interest is the Mt. Simon starting tosandstone.ttle bit of
And I'm a little bit surprised
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
quartz that they can sort this it, but basically is pure enough
and whatever and concentrated smaterial that they can use fors
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
use. formation that's available to
operations up in Wood County and And when you hear about
County, they're in the areas like that, northern Clark
Another type of operation that Mt. Simon.
couple years ago, basically this we're seeing and started a
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
And a lot of this stuff is sand, big piles of white sand.
produced by cranberry growers. actually from waste material
cranberry bogs and they're As they're expanding their
for water storage, they're excavating out these big ponds
Well, a smart entrepreneur from coTexas came up here from ad.
company called Proppant Specialists, and he decided I
could go in and buy this sand, I
wouldn't have to worry about wouldn't have to mine it so I
mine, I wouldn't have to deal with mine safety and MSHA, and I
wouldn't even have to get a NR
I'm just buying agricultural 135 reclamation permit because
And so he set up a plant and waste here.
in the state at the time hated actually all the major producers
good business plan. him It's kind of clever.etty
They still are producing a lot
And this is in part alluvial of sand out of this.
bedrock material. maIt would be Mt. Simonrt
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,
Galesville or Wonewoc sandstone, these are big bluffs of
a plain of Mt. Simon, and tand this stuff was allre on
reworked and weathered during the glacial times when that area
was filled with Glacial Lake
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
is all locally derived and is right there and is already very
much disaggregated soft material, it's a natural for
development.
five or six companies come in looking at developing sand mines
and plants within using this
the area of Monroe County. type of material in particularly
St. Peter sandstone. So let's take a look at the
bunch. This is the youngest of the
up here is a The St. Peter in our area
is in areas like down in little bit finer grain than it
It hasn't really received much Illinois.
for frac sand. interest as far as being used
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
Fairwater on the border with place called Utley near
There's Gelhar Company has a Fond du Lac County.
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
foundry sand mine out there. Dane County, there was a large
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
Cambrian sands so it's not as suitable for a frac sand, but
they're having, right now, a
because many of the producers in shortage of foundry sands
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.
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
every manhole and drain out Brillthere in the streets.ere on
But basically one of the company
companies like Oshkosh Truck people was telling me that
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
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
Down south of Madison it's places.
dune sand. believed that it was actually a
here. You'll see these very big broad
cross beds. Generally, the St. Peter
is a very soft material.
pull it out. You can walk up to an outcrop,
sugar when you pick it up. It's frosted very, it looks like
rounded. Very fine grained and very
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.
entirely hydraulic mining. Basically, there they're doing
disaggregated St. Peter Tsandstone down into a sump
and suck it up the same way as
that up to a plant where it goes they do over at Taylor, pump
then put into stockpiles and through and is processed and
to the foundry industry. shipped for delivery primarily
is a very difficult formation to work, whereas over
in the west, the Jordan and the Wonewoc are fairly uniform
thickness.
can go, it was formed in The St. Peter
underlying Prairie du Chien climestone, and it can actually
vary from nothing here in this
southern Green Lake County. This is a Prairie du Chien
formation down here.
That little rusty sort of line Platteville formation above.
Five miles north of there this horizon in there is St. Peter.
mine just north of Markesan, and is the AF Gelhar Sand plant and
here that he's mining for he has ovfoundry sand.f material
Once you get down to the base of
it's pretty easy to tell the St. Peter,
because you get into a very red wshale 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
Wisconsin? sand mining in south western
Friday. RiI'm going down for a meetingr
with the Lower Wisconsin
meeting down in Spring Green in which we're going to talk about
potential for sand development
valley. dThe Jordan is exposed in a lotn
of the bluffs along these valleys by Boscobel, areas stuff
as that.
green color, potential is still St. Peter down there. that dark
One good thing about it, they have the service of that
Wisconsin central line that goes
port along the river, and this west of Madison down to bridge
thinking about development. hThere's other issues down heree
in terms of preserving the
issues, and I'm not sure just where this is going to go, but
there have been some serious
to what the resources are down inquiries from some companies as
have been approached. herMuch of the area of southers
western Wisconsin, which exposes
sandstone in many of the a lot of St. Peter
Kickapoo and Platte Rivers and valleys down here in the
accessible because the railroads various others, is not
rails through much of that area bbut it ends at Monroe at thisve
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.
Everything else has been shown The Jordan outcrop is shown.
rest of the formation. in the tan color here in the
in that red color which Tindicates there's a lot of itwn
available up to down these
And once you get on top, the St. valleys.
So there's definitely potential Peteresource down there.een.
So let's look at some of the
today and just where we're going issues that surround sand mining
Some of the advantages that you can't ignore: local jobs and
economic growth.
20 people associated or more There's probably an average of
mines, 20-30 jobs. with working in one of these
construction industry right now, Quite a lot of jobs in the
Valley and areas like that and particularly up in Chippewa
newer plants. The demand for natural gas as a,
clean fuel, I think, is going to
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
to do it overnight, and there's saygoing to be an interest tole
develop our own resources here. So I think, number one, the
increasing use of natural gas as
electricity to replace coal is a fuel for generation of
whole lot of choices, burn more coal, build more nukes, whatever
else, but gas has proven to be a
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 osupply.atural gas
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.
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
north, that would be a definite abcontrast in terms of ease ofp
reclamation, but sand mining, basically, are fairly easy to
reclaim back into agricultural
whatever, and reclamation is now land or wild life habit,
There's no way that you can mine required by law in Wisconsin.
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.
there's been a lot of Aiinformation and a lot ofat
misinformation put out about. Fugitive dust, risk from
breathing crystalline silica, these are all real things to
consider, but I think in the end
when compared to other issues we'll findinvolved.very minor
A huge one, which nobody really anticipated and has caused an
awful lot of concern, particularly political concern
among the town associations,
local governments, is truck county asstraffic.s, various
Up until this time, all of our
operations over along the river, big operations, Badger,
up in the east in the St. Peter have all been based on the
rail and rail transport.
operations in places like Chippewa and Barron County where
they build a centralized plant
material in from a series of and are going to truck this
And there's a large plant by a different mines out here.
been built on the north side of cChippewa Falls, and they'rest
anticipating a truck a minute hauling into that plant during
their producing season. It's going through a roundabout,
one of my favorite traffic
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.
we've never had to deal with This is posing problems that
going to be a lot of concern. bBlasting and potential damage,s
everybody's worried about that, but there's very little blasting
involved in sand mining.
operation, these are things that Noise levels, hours of
dealt with in the conditional where youse permit.oning are
Reclamation and subsequent land use, there's always some
disagreements about that but
reclamation because reclamation is a requirement by law in the
state of Wisconsin. Any property before it can be
even opened and started is
plan in place. required to have a reclamation
and how do we deal with them? SGroundwater use, DNR regulates
high capacity wells very
are wells that draw anything closely, and high capacity wells
This includes most industrial wells and irrigation wells, such
things as that. Permits are required to get a
fairly extensive review.
Barron County talking to their I took part in a program up in
DNR who does a lot of the approval work gave a very good
summary of the procedures that
effects on trout streams and go through and evaluating the
in their municipal water surface water and whatever else
of review that goes into the supplies, so there's quite a bit
When you look at it, I was water process.
permitting the original mine involved up in Dune County and
were looking out there and east of Menomonie and people
there, they're going to dry up saying if this thing goes in
going to take all of our water. eAnd you can see out from the
window probably about eight big center pivot irrigation wells
out there.
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
you're doing. wWe'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.
they cause their water supply to If something goes wrong that
whatever, they'll drill them a dry up or they contaminate it or
This time of arrangement has new well.
We've had a number of cases over really worked very successfully.
limestone mines. in eastern Wisconsin with deep
And when you think about it when This has worked quite well.
to invest millions of dollars in a company comes in and is going
very small amount to avoid a operation like this, it's a
neighbors. future problems with your
surface water impact is Wregulated by the DNR just like
it is for any other kind of construction site or mining
operation.
much more potential for Sangroundwater impact than aave
limestone quarry or a gravel
It's just maybe a larger scale pit.
kind of nasty materials that are operation but in terms of any
difference. One issue that's of some concern
is the potential contamination
in the settling ponds because fone of the things they do isd
they recycle a lot of their water and they have to settle
out the fines.
it's polyacrylamides, and nobody So they add flocculants, I think
stuff goes or what happens to is really quitit.ure where this
There's no specific regulations on it.
But there's never been any
if you think about it, many of problems on record with it, and
drink Milwaukee's water, that's the same thing they're using in
that to basically settle out the
Air quality issues are something sediment.
issue in western Wisconsin. tOne thing about it, frac sandig
requires clean, round, unbroken grains.
Process involves disaggregation and screening.
It's usually done wet rather
crushing operation because the than any kind of grinding or
break grains, make them angular, last thing you want to do is
your specks. then their not going to meet
probably less angular crystalline silica dust than a
quarry that crushes quartzite,
like that, or a gravel pit for say up at Baraboo or anywhere
fairly coarse cobble material thand does it without anyhes
particular dust control measures.
Most plants are just a matter of
say in the initial screening, is a lot of the processing, as I
There are standard ways to done wet in the first place.
important, good industry minimize dust which is very
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
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,
They have no problems with it. washes their wheels clean.
their air quality standards about controlling fugitive dust,
and complaints about these kinds
in the DNR coming in there and of things will generally result
techniques be used. Most major operators do this as
a matter of routine.
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
to be done to collect some of some probabthat data.ry studies
Operating issues, really
about it. blastIt's regulating by theerned
Department of Commerce. If you've got a complaint,
that's where you go.
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
even going to make specks for of powder tfrac sand., it's not
The traffic operating schedule, road maintenance, these things
are best handle on conditional
But the problem is that an awful use permit.
companies will come into just because of the convenience have
no zoning.
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
anybody telling us what we're zgoing to do for our land use.e
We're not going to have anybody in here telling us we've got to
keep it all as prime
But then as soon as somebody agriculture, whatever.
sand mine, they start to sing a comlittle bit different tune.cre
But anyway, there's generally an
particularly with many of the bigger companies, and make some
negotiations. Town of Howard up in Chippewa
County is very successful at
since that have done that. this and there's several others
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
You've got to have a public hearing associated with it..
It is required to be submitted
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
No, it has to be specifically set aside for reclamation so
that the county or the local
going to get stuck with the cost government, whatever, is not
That has to be in place before of cleaning up a site.
The good news is that we've had a hundred-year history of sand
mining with very few problems.
dealt with under existing Mostregulations and by usingn be
existing technology and applying
practices. best industry standard
one that, as I said earlier, is Manreally the problem that'sthe
causing troubles out there, rely
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
and loading on to state roads. it's putting a lot of extra wear
done about this right now to So there's quite a bit being
Operational issues can usually work the issues out.
negotiation. be resolved by the zoning or by
production, I think the big thing is that we've just seen a
huge rush in the last year
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
Chippewa County area, the demand the large ones up in the
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
sand that is suitable for frac the only place that does have
There is other sands of lesser sand.
companies are pouring a lot of qualities, and a number of
resources in areas like Texas and Oklahoma, which are actually
closer in some cases, transportation wise, to the
actual oil and gas fields.
those sands are down there The difference is that most of
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
Wisconsin. Jordan formation in western
shake out in the industry, I But there's going to be a big
so because as this comes online, predict, within the next year or
you could go buy a farm out in we're going to see, right now
Trucking and Excavating. Trempealeau County, Bubba's
three dump trucks. He's got a back hoe and two or
digging sand out of some He can go out there, start
down to Winona, Minnesota, farmer's backyard, hauling it
and selling it to a sand company loading it on the Union Pacific
facility, and that stuff is going down there and selling for
$300 or $400 a ton which at the wellhead which is pretty
amazing.
haul it down there, process it Once they process it, they can
wellhead. doWell, as soon as the supplythe
starts to come up, there's going
economics. to be some major changes in the
being built into some of the big We've got some huge capacity
Falls, Winn Bay Sands in plants like EOG up in Chippewa
put a lot in into expanding Ttheir capacity, and I thinkas
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
available very easily and we'vmineable at the surface.t's
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
in our region. to continue to be a big business
it. TAnd I think that I'm not sureor
what kind of technology will
that it has brought us from evtotal dependence to almostt
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
while, at least into the future. to be a demand for it for a
growing but the boom took us by Interest surprise.sin sands
Counties were overwhelmed with
The scale is what really has applications.
haven't dealt with before, like I mentioned early, the guy in
Trempealeau County had four or
deal with, now he finds he's got five little stone quarries to
But he's actually doing a very 20 sand mines.
So conclusions that we can come to out of this, I'm going to
wrap it up here.
of the oil and gas. MotWe don't have any energy, any
basically, in Wisconsin.
But we did get the sand that's We're strictly a consumer state.
need to produce what they could now never produce before.t and
There's a few problems in the process, but I think ultimately
that will get worked out. It produces material very
efficiently.
petroleum geology, you used to You think about back when I took
recovering something like 20% of hear that we were only
oil field. the potential from a particular
efficiency and wasting less So we're reafuel.ncreasing our
Frac sand mining should really
stable industry as long as be continued as a strong a
hydrocarbons and we wish to reduce our dependence on
imports.
everybody has. And I think that's a goal that
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
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
we're going to see a lot of athese little guys who arek
producing, small producers out
by the larger companies or there, either being swallowed up
business because you can't they're going to be put out of
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
spot a 60-car unit train on lothere that the railroad justy
comes and picks up and ships
And that's the way you get your best rates on shipping.
And any of this kind of stuff,
transportation. Efficient producers are going to
be some of the larger companies that have been in the business a
long time.
companies. We've got about three types of
companies like Unimin, US Silica, Badger Mining, Gelhar,
these people know what they're
They've been in the business a doing.
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
They may or may not stay in that their own source of sand.
the small guys out there who are business, and then we've got all
because of the high price for sand, but they're going to be
put out, I think, of business by
The survivors are going to be tthe ones that can ship the
product efficiently, and that's going to be one of the major
factors.
[APPLAUSE] .