The World in a Grain

by Vince Beiser

  In 2010, there were ten frac sand mines and processing plants in Wisconsin; four years later, that number had shot up to 135.6 The state produced around 25 million tons of frac sand in 2014, worth nearly $2 billion. A sharp drop in oil prices had slowed fracking, and hence the demand for sand, when I visited Wisconsin in 2015, but at the time of this writing in 2017, it was rebounding smartly. Production is likely to continue growing, since oil and gas operators have learned that increasing the amount of sand they shoot into a well increases the yield of oil or gas. New frac sand mines are also being opened in Texas as producers seek sources closer to the oil fields. The Trump administration’s enthusiasm for domestically produced fossil fuels can only help the industry’s prospects.

  Nationwide, the legions of silica sand used for fracking have grown tenfold since 2003.7 They now dwarf those used for glassmaking and all other purposes, including silicon chips. By 2016, total silica sand production stood at nearly 92 million tons per year, almost three-quarters of which was used for fracking. Only 7 percent went to the glass industry.8

  Many of the locals in the once-quiet, sand-rich Wisconsin counties have profited from the industry’s growth. But many others are deeply concerned about the impact of all those mines, and the processing plants, trucks, and other industrial impedimenta that come with them, on the area’s air, water, and quality of life. The sand rush has opened deep divisions between its supporters and opponents. “There are family members who aren’t talking to each other,” said Donna Brogan, a supervisor on the town board of Arcadia, a town of around 3,000 people in western Wisconsin. “There’s been huge bad blood.”

  Chippewa County, in western Wisconsin, is some of the most beautiful farming country you could hope to see. It is miles and miles of gently undulating hills checkered with corn and soybean fields. Lush emerald pastures host lazy little herds of black-and-white cows, dotted here and there with gambrel-roofed red barns and stubby silos. It was late fall when I visited, and the thick swatches of trees along the ridgetops were ablaze with reds and yellows of turning leaves. It was as pastoral-pretty as it gets.

  Except, of course, for the sand mines. Across the road from the two-story house where Victoria Trinko lives, a huge tract of that picturesque farmland has been ripped away, leaving a raw brown and yellow weal of exposed earth. Cornfields and bluffs thick with trees lined the edges of what has become a 176-acre industrial zone. Enormous piles of white sand loomed next to a denuded hillside, the side of which had been sheared away as though with a giant cake knife. A sorting and washing machine, a hulking concatenation of conveyor belts, ducts, and metal tanks, clattered as it prepared the sand to be loaded into the trucks that rolled in and out, diesel motors grinding.

  Trinko’s father bought the 80-acre farm where she lives back in 1936. She’s been there most of her sixty-nine years, minus some years living in a nearby town. She still mows the grass and cleans the cow barn by herself, driving a little front-end loader. She is proud of having recently shot dead no fewer than seventeen squirrels that were tearing up her bird feeder. The last few years, though, have been the hardest. “If my dad could see the rape of this land, he’d hate it,” she said. “It’s totally ugly, and it’s detrimental to our health.”

  She loathes everything about the mine—the noise, the truck traffic, the lights at night (the county permits the mine to operate twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week)—but her biggest concern is what the dust from the mine was doing to her. In the months after the Chippewa Sand Company opened it in 2011, every time she went outside, she tasted grit in her teeth and felt dust clinging to her face. Her voice got raspy and her throat was always getting sore. Her doctor sent her to a pulmonary specialist, who diagnosed her with asthma caused by her environment, she said. “I’ve been here all my life, and within ten months of the mine, I’ve got asthma?” She now wears a dust mask outside, and has three air purifiers in the house. “I haven’t opened the windows in years,” she said. “They always say, ‘I can do what I want on my land.’ But the noise, the fumes, the sand—once it leaves your land, it’s on my land.”

  The Chippewa Sand Company wouldn’t let me see its operation. In fact, when I parked outside their gates to snap a few pictures, a worker came out to tell me I wasn’t even allowed to stop there. (Remember Unimin, the giant mining company that gave me a similar reception in North Carolina? They’re also big players in Wisconsin. In fact, Unimin is the biggest frac sand producer in the world.)9

  I did, however, get a thorough tour of another sand mine and processing facility operated by Mississippi Sand in neighboring Trempealeau County. Chad Losinski, the plant manager, evidently felt there was nothing to hide.

  Losinski is a sturdily built twentysomething with a trace of a Polish accent handed down from his grandparents. I met him in October of 2015, at a moment when oil prices had sagged to historic lows. That had caused a big slowdown in fracking operations around the country, which in turn had idled the Mississippi Sand plant. The place had been fully operational for only two years, in fact, before the slumping demand for frac sand forced them to lay off everyone—some forty-odd people—except for Losinski and one other employee. Such is the boom-bust nature of the energy business. Luckily for me, it meant Losinski had some free time.

  Losinski and I clambered up a long flight of steel rungs to reach the top of one of the facility’s handful of hundred-foot storage silos. Once we’d caught our breath, we had an excellent view of the whole 231-acre operation.

  Losinski pointed to a tree-covered hill that had had a portion sheared neatly away, leaving a forty-foot face of exposed rock, marbled with different colored strata. The company was gradually tearing the whole hill to pieces.

  The first step, he explained, is for excavating machines to scrape off the “overburden”—the plants, trees, topsoil, and unwanted miscellaneous rock lying on top of the sandstone that is their target. One reason Wisconsin silica sand is so desirable is because it lies very close to the surface, requiring relatively little digging to get at it.10 The topsoil is piled somewhere out of the way; it will be needed to help reclaim the land once the mine is tapped out, as required by law. Mississippi Sand has built a huge berm out of the topsoil, which helps block the neighbors’ view of the mine. Once the sand is all gone, the plan is to restore the hills; they’ll just be about a third smaller than before.

  Once the sandstone is exposed, blasting experts drill a grid of holes into it, pack them with explosives, and simply blow a chunk of the hillside to smithereens. The sandstone shatters and collapses in a heap of . . . well, sand and stones. Front-end loaders dump the raw sand into trucks. After the “raw pile” is cleared away, excavators tear off another swatch of overburden and the process starts again, the hill disappearing slice by slice.

  Down on the mine floor, the trucks haul the sand a few hundred yards to another pile, from where it’s fed into a complicated behemoth of a machine, a forty-foot-high Frankenstein of pipes, tanks, ladders, catwalks, and conveyor belts. A series of belts haul the sand up some thirty feet to a sorting screen, where jets spray it with water to turn it into a slurry.

  This sand-water mixture is then pumped onto a series of vibrating metal screens, which separate out first the miscellaneous rocks, then the oversize grains, shuffling these unwanted bits into a waste pile. Once everything bigger than .8 millimeters has been screened out, the remaining slurry is pumped up through corrugated pipe into a kind of upside-down pyramid called a hydrosizer. One hundred jets blast down into the cone, creating a carefully calibrated rising current that carries the lighter grains up and over the top into a trough, while the heavier ones sink to the bottom. By controlling the strength of the jets, you control the size of the grains that sink. The sand that ends up on the bottom is the stuff you keep.

  That sand is then run through a series of four attrition tanks—basically giant washing machines that spin the slurry, making the grains grind against one another,
washing off silt or other impurities that might coat them. Last stop is a dewatering screen, a mesh of tiny slots measuring .01 millimeters, big enough for water to get through but not sand.

  Now partly dried, the sand is fed onto a series of three escalating conveyor belts and sprayed up onto an enormous dune of light-beige sand. Losinski reckoned there was about 120,000 tons in the pile on the day I visited.

  (Later, I got a look at processed frac sand grains under a microscope. They were glass-clear, irregularly shaped, but all falling in a narrow range of shape and size, like a bunch of crystalline supermarket potatoes.)

  The sand is taken next to the drying plant, a vast warehouse-style building a few hundred yards away. Trucks load the washed sand into a metal hopper that feeds it onto another series of rising conveyor belts that carry it up to a doorway in the dryer plant, some twenty feet above the ground. Inside is a cavernous space, untouched by natural light, filled with another set of machines. The sand gets one more sifting, to filter out any stray rocks that might have gotten in on the journey from the pile, and then is fed through a long cylindrical tank. A series of ducts underneath the tank blows hot air upward, drying the sand, while smokestack-like chimneys whisk away stray silica dust. “That’s the bad shit,” says Losinski. “That’s the stuff you don’t want to breathe.”

  Crystalline silica dust is sharp and jagged, especially when it’s freshly formed—like that found at sand mines and processing sites—and it can wreak havoc on the lungs. It’s been known for decades that too much exposure can cause silicosis, an especially severe lung disease. In fact, before we set off on our tour, Losinski was legally required to read me a set of warnings including one stating that “prolonged exposure to silica dust can lead to silicosis.” When the dryers are running, wearing a respirator is mandatory.

  The dangerous dust gets sucked away into a bag and mixed with water to form a paste, which is later buried underground. But despite the safety machinery’s best efforts, there are little heaps and hummocks of sand scattered around the plant floor that have sifted out through cracks or bad joins.

  Losinski shrugged. “Nothing’s perfect.”

  A final relay of vibrating screens separates the sand into three size grades. Those are then hauled up a hundred feet in bucket elevators, vertical conveyor belts fitted with dozens of fiberglass buckets, and dumped into one of the 3,000-ton silos atop which Losinski and I stood. Trucks drive right up to the silos, fill up, and haul the product to the nearest rail station in Winona, Minnesota. From there, it’s off to the fracking fields. The sand that used to make up a Wisconsin hillside will be shot deep into the earth hundreds of miles away in Texas or North Dakota.

  There have been small-scale silica sand mines in western Wisconsin for decades, supplying glass factories and foundries. Nobody much minded them. Their impact on the area was manageable. But when the number of mines suddenly mushroomed from a handful to over a hundred in just a few years, locals were taken aback.

  “Everyone was really blindsided” by the inrush of frac sand outfits, said Pat Popple, a retired school principal who has been at the forefront of anti-frac sand mining activism in Chippewa County since the first mine was proposed back in 2008. There are no professional Greenpeace types or idealistic students out here; the industry is opposed mainly by an ad hoc collection of local farmers and homeowners who have educated themselves and each other on the issues.

  “I figured they’d be like coal companies and try to pull the wool over people’s eyes,” Popple said. “We began to realize we were guinea pigs. There had been no studies on the dangers of silica in the air, or what flocculants [chemicals used at the mines] can do to the water. No studies done, and no one asking questions. The county and town board members really didn’t know anything about these questions.”

  “We knew nothing when they first showed up,” agreed Dan Masterpole, director of Chippewa County’s Land Conservation and Forest Management Department. “We’ve learned a lot along the way!”

  One lesson they’ve learned is that no one knows for sure what impact the sand mines are having on the region’s environment and its residents’ health. The mines are just too new. But there are a number of potentially serious risks to be concerned about.

  The first is water. The mines need lots of it to create their slurry and to wash the sand; a single mine can run through as much as 2 million gallons per day. The miners get a lot of it from high-capacity wells, which pump more than 70 gallons a minute from underground aquifers.11 “There’s a lot of concern about whether that will affect groundwater and trout streams fed by these headwaters,” said Ken Schmitt, a Chippewa County dairy farmer and father of four. He carries around a stack of photos showing damage done by the mines, including several of creeks clouded with beige mud. In 2013, the Mississippi Sand mine was fined $60,000 for failing to prevent rainstorms from washing sand and soil into a nearby creek.12

  Schmitt is a sturdily built man with black hair fading into white under his red baseball cap, wearing a frayed denim shirt tucked into beltless Wranglers. He grew up on a family farm and has spent pretty much his whole life in the area. He usually votes Republican. When the mining companies started trying to move in back in 2008, Schmitt went to some of the community meetings about them. What he heard alarmed him.

  “Every time a mining company spoke, their story always changed,” he said. “They’d say, ‘You don’t have to worry about water or air particulates. You won’t even know we’re here.’ Basically they were lying to us, just saying whatever they figured we wanted to hear so they could get their project in. That kind of pissed me off. I thought, if they’re gonna pull this shit, the gloves are off. We’re gonna try and stop them.” He’s become a vocal opponent of the industry at community meetings and to the media.

  So far there’s no evidence that the mines are seriously depleting groundwater, said Masterpole. Then again, as Schmitt pointed out, “A lot of these problems may not show up until after the companies have left.”

  There’s also the question of what to do with wastewater that has been used to wash and process the sand. Typically the wastewater gets pumped into settling ponds; this is where the flocculants Pat Popple worries about are added in. Flocculants help remove particles suspended in the water, which is good. But they also contain acrylamide, a neurotoxin and carcinogen, which is bad. That compound could potentially leach from the ponds into groundwater or surface water, warns a 2014 report13 by the Civil Society Institute and Midwest Environmental Advocates, a group based in Madison, Wisconsin. State regulators launched an investigation into the issue in 2016.

  Kimberlee Wright, Midwest Environmental Advocates’ executive director, also worries about the economic impact of losing all that farmland. “La Crosse has become a global center for biking. There are lots of bed-and-breakfasts and bike trekking companies there now,” she said. “Sometimes when the mines are booming, trucks are going by every thirty seconds.” Who’s going to want to bicycle-tour with that going on?

  “We’re ninety miles from Minneapolis,” says Willem Gebben, a Chippewa County potter whose home is less than a mile from a proposed 1,200-acre sand mine. “Lots of people come here for biking and fishing. No one says, ‘Let’s hop in the car and go look at a strip mine!’ It’s a threat to the whole tourism industry.”

  The most dire concern, though, is over what the mines are putting into the air. The processing plants, heavy equipment, and trucks kick up a lot of dust, including microscopic bits of particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers, known as PM 2.5. When inhaled, particles that size get deep into the lungs, where they can cause or worsen asthma, lung disease, and a range of other ailments. According to JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, PM pollution is estimated to cause 22,000 to 52,000 deaths per year in the United States alone.14

  Particles of silica dust, those tiny bits of frac sand that go airborne, are especially worrisome forms of part
iculate matter. Silica-related lung disease kills hundreds of American workers each year. So it’s a real concern for frac sand miners and others who work at the plants or live nearby. A 2012 study of fracking sites by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health found potentially dangerous levels of airborne silica in almost half of all the samples it took at eleven different sites in five states—in some cases ten times the levels deemed safe.15 At the time of this writing, OSHA was drawing up new regulations to boost safety at silica sand mines.

  Silica dust is also a worry for Victoria Trinko and anyone else—especially children and elderly people—living downwind from sand mines. According to maps developed by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research outfit, more than 25,000 people in Wisconsin live within less than half a mile of existing or proposed sand mines and related sites, and a similar number in neighboring Minnesota and and Iowa. Twenty schools and two hospitals16 are also in that radius. “There are loads of studies on silica in the workplace, but not in people’s homes,” said Kimberlee Wright.

  The existing evidence is mixed. In 2013, Wisconsin researchers collected sixteen air samples from the fence line around a major sand mine and processing plant in Chippewa Falls, and found that the silica content was far higher than the number set as the chronic exposure limit in California, Minnesota, and Texas.17 (Wisconsin has yet to set its own air quality standard for silica.) A more recent study published in the journal Atmosphere, however, found respirable crystalline silica concentrations near three Wisconsin frac sand mines and a processing plant to be below levels considered harmful.18 We may not find out who’s right for a long time. Symptoms of silicosis can take ten to fifteen years to develop.

  Of course, there are local, state, and federal government regulating bodies tasked with making sure frac sand mines operate safely. But because the industry has grown so fast, “the system to permit and regulate them is at best a patchwork of various agencies and can differ substantially from state to state and from locality to locality,” according to the MEA report.19