In silica valley, the sand is moving
Jeff Dankert Staff Writer
LaSalle News Tribune - LaSalle, IL
10/28/2014 8:48:00 AM
In silica valley, the sand is moving. Mining of silica sand has ramped up in the Illinois Valley, especially in La Salle County, to feed the growing fracking industry.
This has attracted a lot of public attention. Those who are not interested will find plenty of sand in which to bury their heads.
La Salle County has had sand mines since the 1800s. But now there is a rush for the region’s silica sand for use in hydraulic fracturing of bedrock to extract oil and natural gas. New shipping terminals are springing up and existing truck, rail and barge stations are seeing new business.
Expect more
In September, Peru Alderman Dave Waldorf received an email from a sand trucking company.
The sand company indicated it was concerned about wear and tear on Water Street, which is along Peru’s riverfront and links to river shipping terminals. The company also was concerned about truck volume and safety, Waldorf said.
“It’s coming,” Waldorf said. “It’s a focus right now because La Salle County has this sand that is wanted on a national level. I think there’s going to end up being a lot of trucks. We have options of charging tipping fees and we’re looking into that.”
In La Salle-Peru, truckers access Illinois River terminals via Bucklin Street in La Salle, using the two-block section south of U.S. 6. This truck traffic has noticeably increased. This summer, Illinois Department of Transportation and Illinois State Police set up scales and checked tractor-trailers on Bucklin Street. However, state police had no information on the loads that the trucks were carrying.
Bottleneck
The rush of frac sand mining has created a shortage for shipping space and personnel, said Karen Heller, owner of Silica Sand Transport Inc., Ottawa. Silica Sand Transport is devoted solely to transporting the silica sand.
“There is a shortage of railcars right now,” Heller said. “Because the railcars are hauling frac sand, they also don’t have enough rail cars to ship the grain.”
This has driven up cost of shipping and sand.
“You have customers paying twice as much for shipping raw materials,” she said. “There’s more sand on this planet that we can imagine in our lifetime. The biggest issue is there are not enough truck drivers out there. I have a hard time getting applicants. I can’t get applicants in the door right now.”
Demand is pressuring existing mining and processing. The U.S. Department of Transportation limits drivers’ work day to 14 hours. And there are not enough terminals to meet the demand, Heller said.
“The lines of trucks at sand plants are getting longer and longer,” she said. “The waiting time is longer. It’s eating up drivers’ available hours.”
There also is more transloading time — on-and-off railcars, barges and trucks, from point to point, shuttling loads of sand between plants, terminals and rail spurs to serve intended customers, she said.
Word came last week that the city of Peru has agreed to sell its 3.5-mile rail line for $1.25 million to Illinois Railway, division of Omnitrax. This line serves several industries, including Quality Sand Products processing plant. The line requires repairs the city cannot afford and now cannot support fully-loaded boxcars, according to the city’s attorney. Representatives of Quality Sand Products did not return News Tribune phone calls last week.
Sand is heavy
Silica Sand Transport Inc. trucks sand within about 150 miles of Ottawa, occasionally farther. This lets truckers get back home daily, Heller said. It has 10 trucks plus it contracts with an 11th trucker, she said.
The maximum allowed gross vehicle weight — tractor-trailer plus load — is 80,000 pounds. Sand is heavy, so most sand trucks meet this limit with half-filled trailers, Heller said. For a typical tractor-trailer, this is the rig plus 26 tons. Gross truck weights over 75,000 pounds require a $550 per year federal heavy highway vehicle use tax.
Some in the trucking industry want to raise the weight limit to 100,000 pounds, Heller said.
Unless roads are posted, semitrailers can travel most anywhere in cities. Regularly established routes to terminals and river docks usually are accepted by local officials, she said.
Refined product
Because silica sand is needed in various purities and grades, Silica Sand Transport must guard against contamination from other commodities, Heller said. Small amounts of fly ash, salt, coal slag, fertilizer, corn and bother products can make the sand unusable, she said.
“It depends on the customers,” she said. “The customer’s processing is fine-tuned so it’s really important that people have a pure product. At the sand plant, the product gets loaded into clean tanks and is blended the way the customers need it. We have acquired a lot of customers that have had contamination from other carriers.”
Silica sand is used for many applications such as making molds and grout. Heller’s company serves customers who need uncontaminated silica and dedicates semitrailers to specific grades so that whole grain sand cannot contaminate ground silica, Heller said.
More sand than oil
The supply of silica sand likely will outlast supply of oil and gas, Heller said.
“Silica is all over the world,” she said. “We obviously have plenty of sand. As far as the oil in the shale it’s still a non-renewable resource. Eventually it will run out.”
As the industry expands and faces public scrutiny, conflicts that arise need to be resolved locally, Heller said.
“We provide a lot of revenue and income to the area,” Heller said. “We have to work together.”
Jeff Dankert can be reached at (815) 220-6977 or perureporter@newstrib.com. Follow him on Twitter @NT_Peru.
Sand expansion in La Salle County
- In 2011, Quality Sand Products opened a sand processing plant in north Peru and announced plans for a sand processing and shipping plant west of Troy Grove to store finished silica sand and move it on trucks and railcars. In 2013, Quality Sand Products announced plans for a new mine near Interstate 80 and Route 178 on the east side of
La Salle.
- In 2012 it was announced that Peru Street in Troy Grove would be widened to accommodate more sand trucks. Sand companies Unimin Corp. and Manley Bros. agreed to pay for the work.
- Last year a new storage and barge terminal for Archer Daniels Midland was permitted in Ottawa to accept sand from the proposed Mississippi Sand LLC mine east of Starved Rock State Park. This sand will enter Ottawa by truck along Route 71 south of the river.
- This year, Northern White Sand got La Salle County’s permission to build a sand processing plant along U.S. 6 east of its mine in Utica to ship sand by truck and permission to build a slurry line from its mine to the Illinois River for barge loading.
- This year, Unimin announced plans to process more sand at its plant in Utica, anticipating five more trucks per hour and more railcar shipping.
- This month, EOG Resources Inc. made public its plan to build a sand shipping terminal in Earlville. The city council is expected to vote next month on the proposal.
- On Brunner Street along Peru’s riverfront, a sand storage barn and new river dock are going up, to be operated by Vectora Transportation of Chicago. The site has access to railcars, barges and trucks.
