Wisconsin Public Television University Place Wednesday Nite at the Lab  Bruce Brown Frac Sands: Issues And Resources In Wisconsin  November 30, 2011 UP663    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. [APPLAUSE]