Title : "Wisconsin is the nation’s leading producer of sand used in hydraulic fracturing...."
link : "Wisconsin is the nation’s leading producer of sand used in hydraulic fracturing...."
"Wisconsin is the nation’s leading producer of sand used in hydraulic fracturing...."
"Wisconsin sand, prized by frackers for its grains’ ideal size, shape and durability, is shipped to drilling sites including Texas, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Canada...."“This resurrection of the sand boom is important because it’s happening at a time when some communities are suffering because agricultural prices are low,” [said industry consultant Kent Syverson, chairman of UW-Eau Claire’s geology department]....The article — "Sand industry back in business in western Wisconsin" — doesn't explain why this great sand is in Wisconsin. Ah, here, from the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences Arts & Letters:
While the northern white sand found in the Midwest remains the highest quality and generates the highest yields for fracking, it costs $60 to $70 per ton to ship it to Texas, and more companies are exploring the possibility of using [lower-quality] Texas sand instead to save on transportation costs....
Frac sand is defined by its purity, shape, and toughness. It is more than 99% quartz, the grains are highly spherical, and it is extremely hard to crush....ALSO: Recently, in The New Yorker: "The World Is Running Out of Sand/It’s one of our most widely used natural resources, but it’s scarcer than you think."
Quartz is comprised of silicon and oxygen. A silicon atom in quartz has four positive charges, and to each of those is bonded a negatively charged oxygen atom. It balances nicely, four negatives bonded to four positives. Many minerals contain silicon bonded to oxygen, but the special attribute of quartz is that its silicon atoms share oxygen amongst themselves: Each oxygen atom in quartz is completing the charge balance for not one but two silicon atoms. That means the atomic scaffolding in that tiny grain of rock is so inter-bonded that a billion years of weathering can’t break it down....
The quartz-rich crystalline rock of the Precambrian era is very old. According to [Wisconsin’s State Geologist James] Robertson, these sands spent nearly a billion years near Earth’s surface, relatively free of overlying rock, where they underwent a cycle of repeated weathering, re-working, and rounding before being swept into the Cambrian sea that eventually deposited them in today’s Wisconsin....
After a billion years, all that was left was the most resistant of all minerals: quartz. And even the quartz started weathering after a while with the hard edges of the sand grains getting chipped away, leaving more spherical bits of quartz.
These well-sorted, atomically fortified grains fit the frac sand bill. This sand, Robertson says, has a crush resistance of 4,000- 6,000 pounds per square inch (psi). That means each grain has the ability to maintain its shape while thousands of pounds bears down on it. Together, the grains can and do bear even more pressure from overlying rock thousands of feet deep.
“You can’t have a bunch of wussy sand that falls apart when you squeeze it,” Robertson says.
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