by Vince Beiser
The quartz for the crucibles, like the silicon they will produce, needs to be almost absolutely pure, purged as thoroughly as possible of other elements. Spruce Pine quartz is highly pure to begin with, and purer still after being put through several rounds of froth flotation. But some of the grains may still have what Glover calls interstitial crystalline contamination—molecules of other minerals attached to the quartz molecules. That’s frustratingly common. “I’ve evaluated thousands of quartz samples from all over the world,” said John Schlanz, chief minerals processing engineer at the Minerals Research Laboratory in Asheville, about an hour from Spruce Pine. “Near all of them have contaminate locked in the quartz grains that you can’t get out.”
Some Spruce Pine quartz is flawed in this way. Those grains, the washouts from the Delta Force of the quartz selection process, are used for high-end beach sand and golf course bunkers—most famously the salt-white traps of Augusta National Golf Club,15 site of the iconic Masters Tournament. A golf course in the oil-drunk United Arab Emirates imported 4,000 tons of this sand in 2008 to make sure its sand traps were world-class, too.
The very best Spruce Pine quartz, however, has an open crystalline structure, which means that hydrofluoric acid can be injected right into the crystal molecules to dissolve any lingering traces of feldspar or iron, taking the purity up another notch. Technicians take it one step further by reacting the quartz with chlorine or hydrochloric acid at high temperatures,16 then putting it through one or two more trade-secret steps of physical and chemical processing.
The result is what Unimin markets as Iota quartz, the industry standard of purity. The basic Iota quartz is 99.998 percent pure SiO2. It is used to make things like halogen lamps and photovoltaic cells, but it’s not good enough to make those crucibles in which polysilicon is melted. For that you need Iota 6, or the tip-top of the line, Iota 8, which clocks in at 99.9992 percent purity—meaning for every one billion molecules of SiO2, there are only eighty molecules of impurities.17 Iota 8 sells for up to $10,000 a ton. Regular construction sand, at the other end of the sand scale, can be had for a few dollars per ton.
At his house, Glover showed me some Iota under a microscope. Seen through the instrument’s lens (itself made from a much less pure quartz sand), the jagged little shards were as clear as glass and bright as diamonds.
Unimin sells this ultra-high-purity quartz sand to companies like General Electric, which melts it, spins it, and fuses it into what looks like a salad bowl made of milky glass: the crucible.18 “It’s safe to say the vast majority of those crucibles are made from Spruce Pine quartz,” said Schlanz.
The polysilicon is placed in those quartz crucibles, melted down, and set spinning. Then a silicon seed crystal about the size of a pencil is lowered into it, spinning in the opposite direction. The seed crystal is slowly withdrawn, pulling behind it what is now a single giant silicon crystal.19 These dark, shiny crystals, weighing about 220 pounds, are called ingots.
The ingots are sliced into thin wafers. Some are sold to solar cell manufacturers. Ingots of the highest purity are polished to mirror smoothness and sold on to a chipmaker like Intel. It’s a thriving trade; wafers were a $292 billion industry in 2012.20
The chipmaker imprints patterns of transistors on the wafer using a process called photolithography. Copper is implanted to link those billions of transistors to form integrated circuits. Even a minute particle of dust can ruin the chip’s intricate circuitry, so all of this happens in what’s called a clean room, where purifiers keep the air thousands of times cleaner than a hospital operating room. Technicians dress in an all-covering white uniform affectionately known as a bunny suit.21 To ensure the wafers don’t get contaminated during manufacture, many of the tools used to move and manipulate them are, like the crucibles, made from high-purity quartz.22
The wafers are then cut into tiny, unbelievably thin quadrangular chips—computer chips, the brains inside your mobile phone or laptop. The whole process requires hundreds of precise, carefully controlled steps. The chip that results is easily one of the most complicated man-made objects on Earth, yet made with the most common stuff on Earth: humble sand.
The total amount of high-purity quartz produced worldwide each year is estimated at 30,000 tons23—less than the amount of construction sand produced in the United States every hour. Only Unimin knows exactly how much Spruce Pine quartz is produced, because it doesn’t publish any production figures. It is an organization famously big on secrecy. “Spruce Pine used to be mom-and-pop operations,” said Schlanz. “When I first worked up there, you could just walk into any of the operations. You could just go across the street and borrow a piece of equipment.” Nowadays Unimin won’t even allow staff of the Minerals Research Laboratory inside the mines or processing facilities. Any contractors brought in for repair work have to sign confidentiality agreements. Whenever possible, vice-president Richard Zielke recently declared in court papers, the company splits up the work among different contractors so that no individual can learn too much. Unimin buys equipment and parts from multiple vendors for the same reason.24 Glover has heard of contractors being blindfolded inside the processing plants until they arrive at the specific area where their jobs are and of an employee who was fired on the spot for bringing someone in without authorization. He says the company doesn’t even allow its employees to socialize with those of their competitors.
It was hard to check out Glover’s stories, because Unimin wouldn’t talk to me. Unlike most big corporations, its website lists no contact for a press spokesperson or public relations representative. Several emails to their general inquiries address went unanswered. When I called the company’s headquarters in Connecticut, the woman who answered the phone seemed mystified by the concept of a journalist wanting to ask questions. She put me on hold for a few minutes, then came back to tell me the company has no PR department, but that if I faxed (faxed!) her my questions, someone might get back to me. Eventually I got in touch with a Unimin executive who asked me to send her my questions by email. I did so. The response: “Unfortunately, we are not in a position to provide answers at this point in time.”
So I tried the direct approach. Like all the quartz mining and processing facilities in the area, Unimin’s Schoolhouse Quartz Plant, set in a valley amid low, thickly treed hills, is surrounded by a barbed-wire-topped fence. Security isn’t exactly at the level of Fort Knox, but the message is clear.
One Saturday morning I went to take a look at the plant with David Biddix. We parked across the street from the gate. A sign warned that the area was under video surveillance, and that neither guns nor tobacco were allowed inside. As soon as I hopped out to snap a few photos, a matronly woman in a security guard uniform popped out of the gatehouse. “Watcha doin’?” she asked conversationally. I gave her my friendliest smile and told her I was a journalist writing a book about sand, including about the importance of the quartz sand in this very facility. She took that all in skeptically, and asked me to call Unimin’s local office the following Monday to get permission.
“Sure, I’ll do that,” I said. “I just want to take a look, as long as I’m here.”
“Well, please don’t take pictures,” she said. There wasn’t much to see—some piles of white sand, a bunch of metal tanks, a redbrick building near the gate—so I agreed. She lumbered back inside. I put away my camera and pulled out my notebook. That brought her right back out.
“You don’t look like a terrorist”—she laughed apologetically—“but these days you never know. I’m asking you to leave before I get grumpy.”
“I understand,” I said. “I just want to take a few notes. And anyway, this is a public road. I have the right to be here.”
That really displeased her. “I’m doing my job,” she snapped.
“I’m doing mine.”
“All right, I’m taking notes, too,” she declared. “And if anything happens . . .” Leaving the consequ
ences unspecified, she strode over to my rental car and officiously wrote down its license plate number, then asked for the name of “my companion” in the passenger seat. I didn’t want to get Biddix in any trouble, so I politely declined, hopped in, and drove off. It was a frustrating encounter for all concerned, but at least there weren’t any shovel-toting goons this time.
If you really want a sense of how zealously Unimin guards its trade secrets, ask Dr. Tom Gallo. He used to work for the company, and then for years had his life ruined by it.
Gallo is a small, lean man in his fifties, originally from New Jersey. He relocated to North Carolina when he was hired by Unimin in 1997. His first day on the job, he was handed a confidentiality agreement; he was surprised at how restrictive it was and didn’t think it was fair. But there he was, way out in Spruce Pine, with all his possessions in a moving truck, his life in New Jersey already left behind. So he signed it.
Gallo worked for Unimin in Spruce Pine for twelve years. When he left, he signed a noncompete agreement that forbade him from working for any of the company’s competitors in the high-purity quartz business for five years. He and his wife moved to Asheville and started up an artisanal pizza business, which they dubbed Gallolea—his last name plus that of a friend who had encouraged him. It was a rough go. The pizza business was never a big moneymaker, and it was soon hit with a lawsuit over its name from the E. & J. Gallo Winery. Gallo spent thousands of dollars fighting the suit—it’s his name, after all—but eventually decided the prudent course would be to give up and change the company’s name. The five-year noncompete term had run out by then, so when a small start-up quartz company, I-Minerals, called to offer Gallo a consulting gig, he gladly accepted. I-Minerals put out a press release bragging about the hire and touting Gallo’s expertise.
That turned to be a big mistake. Unimin promptly filed a lawsuit against Gallo and I-Minerals, accusing them of trying to steal Unimin’s secrets.
“There was no call, no cease-and-desist order, no investigation,” said Gallo. “They filed a 150-page brief against me on the basis of a press release.”
Over the next several years, Gallo spent tens of thousands of dollars fighting the suit. “That’s how billion-dollar corporations terrify people,” he said. “I had to take money out of my 401(k) to defend myself against this totally baseless lawsuit. We were afraid we would lose our house. It was terrifying. You can’t imagine how many sleepless nights my wife and I have had.” His pizza business collapsed. “When Unimin filed suit, we had just gotten over the Gallo thing. It was the sledgehammer that broke the camel’s back. We’d worked on it for five years. It was more than we could handle emotionally, psychologically, and financially.”
Unimin eventually lost the case, appealed it to federal court, and finally dropped it. I-Minerals and Gallo separately countersued Unimin, calling its suit an abuse of the judicial process aimed at harassing a potential competitor. Unimin eventually agreed to pay an undisclosed sum to have the suits withdrawn. Under the terms of the settlement, Gallo can’t disclose the details, but said bitterly, “When you get sued by a big corporation, you lose no matter what.”
For all the wealth that comes out of the ground in the Spruce Pine area, not much of it stays there. Today the mines are all owned by foreign corporations. They’re highly automated, so they don’t need many workers. “Now there’s maybe twenty-five or thirty people on a shift, instead of three hundred,” said Biddix. The area’s other jobs are vanishing. “We had seven furniture factories here when I was a kid,” said Biddix. “We had knitting mills making blue jeans and nylons. They’re all gone.”
Median household income in Mitchell County, where Spruce Pine sits, is just over $37,000, far below the national average of $51,579. Twenty percent of the county’s 15,000 people, almost all of whom are white,25 live below the poverty line. Fewer than one in seven adults has a college degree.
People find ways to get by. Glover has a side business growing Christmas trees on his property. Biddix makes his living running the website of a nearby community college.
One of the few new sources of jobs are several huge data processing centers that have opened up in the area. Attracted by the cheap land, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and other tech companies have all opened up server farms within an hour’s drive of Spruce Pine.26
In a sense, Spruce Pine’s quartz has come full circle. “When you talk to Siri, you’re talking to a building here at the Apple center,” said Biddix.
I pulled out my iPhone and asked Siri if she knew where her silicon brains came from.
“Who, me?” she replied the first time.
I tried again.
“I’ve never really thought about it,” she said.
I can’t blame her. Most of us never think about how our high-tech industries depend on sand. Even fewer realize that increasingly, America’s twenty-first-century fossil fuel industry does, too.
CHAPTER 6
Fracking Facilitator
On a platform several stories above the North Dakota prairie, a roaring, mud-stained, 1,500-horsepower motor spun a steel rod as thick as a softball bat in an endless pirouette. The rod continued down through about thirty feet of metal housing and then burrowed into the ground. Below the earth, the drill extended for a distance almost twice as long as the Golden Gate Bridge.
Inside an adjoining control room, a fleshy operator whose hard hat identified him as Chuck reclined in a chair surrounded by seven swing-mounted monitors, looking like the king of all video gamers as he tracked the drill’s progress. It went about two miles straight down, then turned sideways for another mile. It was chewing its way, at 110 feet per hour, through a second horizontal mile of solid rock. The purpose: preparing all that rock to be hydraulically fractured—a process better known as fracking.
Fracking is about as popular with the general public as kicking puppies, but it’s very big business. Nearly 5 million barrels of oil per day, along with immense amounts of natural gas, are being extracted from the fracking fields in North Dakota, Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Thanks to the fracking boom, which kicked into high gear in 2008, the United States has overtaken Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s biggest oil and gas producer.
None of this could happen without sand. America’s fracking fields are the latest front to which we have deployed armies of sand to maintain our lifestyle.
Energy companies have known for decades that shale rock formations, such as North Dakota’s Bakken Formation, hold huge amounts of hydrocarbons. The problem was extracting them. In conventional oil- or gas-bearing rock, the hydrocarbon molecules flow through pores in the stone into a well, like seawater seeping into a hole dug on a sandy beach. But shale formations are so dense that the oil and gas can’t flow through them.
The solution is to fracture—frack—the rock. By shooting a highly pressurized mix of water, chemicals, and sand into a well bore, drillers shatter the surrounding shale, spider-webbing it with tiny cracks through which the hydrocarbons can flow. They need the sand to keep the cracks open, holding fast against the pressure of the surrounding rock that wants to close them back up. In 2000, a Texas oil entrepreneur named George Mitchell refined the technique and married it with the rapidly developing technology of horizontal drilling,1 with the result that previously unreachable oil and gas became accessible. The rest of the industry soon copied the system, and the fracking boom was on.
American shale gas production totaled 320 billion cubic feet in 2000; in 2016, the number was 15.8 trillion.2 The Energy Information Administration estimates shale gas alone could meet US natural gas needs for the next forty years.
Meanwhile, EOG Resources—a company you may remember by its former name, Enron—started fracking the Bakken in 2006. Since then, North Dakota’s annual oil production has nearly quintupled, to over half a million barrels a day. The number of wells has jumped from less than 100 to around 6,000.3 There’s more shale oi
l coming online in Texas and several other states, and a potential mother lode in California, where environmental concerns have limited drilling—for now.
Every one of those wells needs sand, and lots of it. A single well can use as much as 25,000 tons—enough to fill more than two hundred railroad cars. But like members of a specialized combat unit, frac sand grains need to meet a list of highly specific physical requirements. They must be hard enough to withstand all that pressure, which means they must be at least 95 percent quartz.4 That eliminates most common construction sand, shrinking the pool to the silica sands used for glassmaking. But frac sand must also have the right shape: small enough to fit snugly into the frack cracks and rounded enough to let the hydrocarbons slide easily around them. Most quartz grains, you’ll recall, are angular; there aren’t many places where you can find grains with such high purity and low angularity.
The quartz sands under the ground of western and central Wisconsin5 have just that rare combination. These are ancient grains that were eroded, transported, then buried and uplifted again. Generally speaking, the older a grain is, the more rounded it is, thanks to however many extra million years of having its angles and edges worn down. Wisconsin also happens to have an excellent rail network and relatively lax environmental regulations. And so the fracking boom has sparked a frac-sand boom in the Badger State. Thousands of acres of the state’s farmland and forest are being torn up to get at the precious silica below.
