Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Here's what transpired at the House Mining & Outdoor Recreation Policy Committee meeting yesterday

Check out this website for an article about the frac sand proceedings in St. Paul yesterday.  See especially Lynn Schoen's three minutes of testimony:

http://theuptake.org/2015/01/27/mn-towns-ignored-in-frac-sand-mining-debate-says-wabasha-city-council-member/

Then read Katie Himanga's excellent summary below...Jeanne

"Here's what transpired at the House Mining & Outdoor Recreation Policy Committee meeting yesterday:

Industry representatives included CEOs, attorneys, Presidents and the like from Minnesota's largest companies. Several stated how pleased they were to be INVITED to testify at the hearing. Many, perhaps all, had prepared statements that they read into the record.

Several legislatures used time for questions to make effusive statements of support for the industries represented rather than ask a questionSome made statements (generally couched as questions) that reflect a lack of understanding of SE Minnesota geology, misinformation about the Silica Rule-Making Advisory Panel and, more than anything, bias in favor of industry.

Unimen paid Dr. John Richard, PhD, PE, QSTI Air Control Techniques of North Carolina to come to to the hearing (they had secured a slot on the agenda for him) and testify about air emissions. One legislator was informed enough to ask about the smallest particle sizes. Dr. Richard's had to shorten his presentation because other speakers had run long
Agency professionals from the EQB and PCA gave updates on the Rule-Making process. The DNR was asked to come back to another meeting due to time constraints

As a result of citizen complaints to the Committee, a few minutes were added to the meeting and citizens allowed to speak. Speakers from our area were Amy Nelson, Lynn Schoen and me. Amy and Lynn addressed the inappropriateness of a hearing on this subject with no time scheduled for citizen or local government input. I addressed reclamation.
The Chairperson made a point of mentioning that the Land Stewardship Project was invited to speak but had declined (they'd been told they could speak for 2 minutes during citizen input which is much different that equal-time-for-citizens that LSP requested)

My impression: the "informational meeting" was for the purpose of grooming legislators; preparing them to discredit the work of the Silica Rule-Making Advisory Panel, fight the adoption of Rules, continue with industry status quo and still be able to sleep at night.

Industry representatives have been respectful participants in the rule-making process, but I cannot imagine that they plan to do anything other than fight tooth-and-nail against adoption.

Katie"
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Tuesday, January 27, 2015

hearing that shuts out the voices of these rural Minnesotans while giving time to industry lobbyists is undemocratic and unfair.

Hi folks,
 
Rochester Post-Bulletin reporter Heather Carlson wrote a good blog post on tomorrow's events. It's here: http://postbulletin.typepad.com/political_party/2015/01/frac-sand-mining-opponents-want-house-hearing-cancelled.html
 
If you're so inclined, please considering leaving your own thoughts in the comments on the post, and/or sharing the post on social media. Heather told me she also plans to be there to cover the hearing tomorrow.
 
Johanna
 
Johanna Rupprecht
Policy Organizer
Land Stewardship Project
 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  
 
Representative Hackbarth, Chair
Mining and Outdoor Recreation Policy Committee
100 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
Saint Paul, Minnesota 55155
 
January 23, 2015
 
Dear Representative Hackbarth:
 
The Mining and Outdoor Recreation Policy Committee has an informational hearing on the frac sand industry scheduled for Tuesday, January 27. It is clear from the meeting announcement that representatives of the frac sand industry will be given ample time to testify while no time at all is scheduled for citizens. Rural Minnesotans throughout southeast Minnesota and the Minnesota River Valley have made it clear that they are deeply concerned about this issue and want their voices heard.A hearing that shuts out the voices of these rural Minnesotans while giving time to industry lobbyists is undemocratic and unfair.
 
Therefore, we request that Tuesday’s hearing be re-scheduled for a future date, at which time the speaking time provided to citizens will be at least equal to that provided to corporate interests. If the January 27 hearing does take place, we request you hold a second hearing devoted to citizen testimony with sufficient advance notice for rural Minnesotans to participate.
 
Sincerely,
 
Johanna Rupprecht
Policy Organizer
Land Stewardship Project
Lewiston, MN
507-523-3366
 
Margaret Walsh
LSP Member
Winona, MN
 
Bonita Underbakke
LSP Member
Lanesboro, MN
 
Marilyn Frauenkron Bayer
LSP Member
Houston, MN
 
cc: Rep. Kurt Daudt, Speaker of the House; Members of the Mining and Outdoor Recreation Policy Committee


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Sunday, December 28, 2014

Everything's Coming Together While Everything Falls Apart

The Climate for 2015 
Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com
It was the most thrilling bureaucratic document I’ve ever seen for just one reason: it was dated the 21st day of the month of Thermidor in the Year Six. Written in sepia ink on heavy paper, it recorded an ordinary land auction in France in what we would call the late summer of 1798. But the extraordinary date signaled that it was created when the French Revolution was still the overarching reality of everyday life and such fundamentals as the distribution of power and the nature of government had been reborn in astonishing ways. The new calendar that renamed 1792 as Year One had, after all, been created to start society all over again.
In that little junk shop on a quiet street in San Francisco, I held a relic from one of the great upheavals of the last millennium. It made me think of a remarkable statement the great feminist fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin had made only a few weeks earlier. In the course of a speech she gave while accepting a book award she noted, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
That document I held was written only a few years after the French had gotten over the idea that the divine right of kings was an inescapable reality. The revolutionaries had executed their king for his crimes and were then trying out other forms of government. It’s popular to say that the experiment failed, but that’s too narrow an interpretation. France never again regressed to an absolutist monarchy and its experiments inspired other liberatory movements around the world (while terrifying monarchs and aristocrats everywhere).
Americans are skilled at that combination of complacency and despair that assumes things cannot change and that we, the people, do not have the power to change them. Yet you have to be abysmally ignorant of history, as well as of current events, not to see that our country and our world have always been changing, are in the midst of great and terrible changes, and are occasionally changed through the power of the popular will and idealistic movements. As it happens, the planet’s changing climate now demands that we summon up the energy to leave behind the Age of Fossil Fuel (and maybe with it some portion of the Age of Capitalism as well).

How to Topple a Giant
To use Le Guin’s language, physics is inevitable: if you put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the planet warms, and as the planet warms, various kinds of chaos and ruin are let loose. Politics, on the other hand, is not inevitable. For example, not so many years ago it would have seemed inevitable that Chevron, currently the third biggest corporation in the country, would run the refinery town of Richmond, California, as its own private fiefdom. You could say that the divine right of Chevron seemed like a given. Except that people in Richmond refused to accept it and so this town of 107,000 mostly poor nonwhites pushed back.

In recent years, a group of progressives won election to the city council and the mayor’s seat, despite huge expenditures by Chevron, the corporation that also brought you gigantic oil spills onshore in Ecuador and offshore in Brazil, massive contamination from half a century of oil extraction in Nigeria, and Canadian tar-sands bitumen sent by rail to the Richmond refinery. Mayor Gayle McLaughin and her cohorts organized a little revolution in a town that had mostly been famous for its crime rate and for Chevron’s toxic refinery emissions, which periodically create emergencies, sometimes requiring everyone to take shelter (and pretend that they are not being poisoned indoors), sometimes said -- by Chevron -- to be harmless, as with last Thursday's flames that lit up the sky, visible as far away as Oakland.  

As McLaughin put it of her era as mayor:
“We’ve accomplished so much, including breathing better air, reducing the pollution, and building a cleaner environment and cleaner jobs, and reducing our crime rate. Our homicide number is the lowest in 33 years and we became a leading city in the Bay Area for solar installed per capita. We’re a sanctuary city. And we’re defending our homeowners to prevent foreclosures and evictions. And we also got Chevron to pay $114 million extra dollars in taxes.”

For this November’s election, the second-largest oil company on Earth officially spent $3.1 million to defeat McLaughin and other progressive candidates and install a mayor and council more to its liking. That sum worked out to about $180 per Richmond voter, but my brother David, who’s long been connected to Richmond politics, points out that, if you look at all the other ways the company spends to influence local politics, it might be roughly ten times that.
Nonetheless, Chevron lost. None of its candidates were elected and all the grassroots progressives it fought with billboards, mailers, television ads, websites, and everything else a lavishly funded smear campaign can come up with, won.

If a small coalition like that can win locally against a corporation that had revenues of $228.9 billion in 2013, imagine what a large global coalition could do against the fossil-fuel giants. It wasn’t easy in Richmond and it won’t be easy on the largest scale either, but it’s not impossible. The Richmond progressives won by imagining that the status quo was not inevitable, no less an eternal way of life. They showed up to do the work to dent that inevitability. The billionaires and fossil fuel corporations are intensely engaged in politics all the time, everywhere, and they count on us to stay on the sidelines. If you look at their response to various movements, you can see that they fear the moment we wake up, show up, and exercise our power to counter theirs.  

That power operated on a larger scale last week, when local activists and public health professionals applied sufficient pressure to get New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to sign legislation banning fracking statewide. Until the news broke on December 17th, the outcome had seemed uncertain. It’s a landmark, a watershed decision: a state has decided that its considerable reserves of fossil fuel will not be extracted for the foreseeable future, that other things -- the health of its people, the purity of its water -- matter more. And once again, the power of citizens turned out to be greater than that of industry.

Just a few days before the huge victory in New York, the nations of the world ended their most recent talks in Lima, Peru, about a global climate treaty -- and they actually reached a tentative deal, one that for the first time asks all nations, not just the developed ones, to reduce emissions. The agreement has to get better -- to do more, demand more of every nation -- by the global climate summit in Paris in December of 2015.  

It’s hard to see how we’ll get there from here, but easy to see that activists and citizens will have to push their nations hard. We need to end the age of fossil fuels the way the French ended the age of absolute monarchy. As New York State and the town of Richmond just demonstrated, what is possible has been changing rapidly. 
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Friday, October 10, 2014

Tell Gov. Dayton We Need Tough Frac Sand Restrictions

Tell Gov. Dayton We Need Tough Frac Sand Restrictions

Despite 2013 state legislation directing Minnesota agencies to create air quality standards and improve environmental review for frac sand facilities, the regulations are yet to be established. And we do not have a clear commitment from Governor Mark Dayton that these rules will be tough and put health, safety and rural communities before frac sand mining interests. This is a critical time to ramp up our efforts to demand that Gov. Dayton uses his authority to create stringent frac sand regulations.

Contact Gov. Dayton today at 651-201-3400 or 800-657-3717 and deliver the message that we need him "all in" when it comes to protecting Minnesota from the frac sand industry.

 For more information, see LSP's Frac Sand Organizing web page or contact LSP's Bobby King by calling him at 612-722-6377 or sending an e-mail.
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Sunday, September 28, 2014

Evidence Mounts of Hidden Fracking Hazards

Published on Frday, September 26, 2014 by Common Dreams

Evidence Mounts of Hidden Fracking Hazards

"We need strong state action to protect the public health from yet another troubling side effect of the unprecedented wave of shale gas development," environmentalist warns
byDeirdre Fulton, staff writer
A web of roads, pipelines, and fracking wells. (Photo: Simon Fraser University/flickr/cc)
A major report released Thursday exposes a hidden hazard of fracking: the mining of the special sand—known as 'frac sand,' for short—that is essential to the practice.
Frac sand mining uses significant volumes of groundwater, contributes to air pollution, and has negative socio-economic impacts, according to "Communities At Risk: Frac Sand Mining in the Upper Midwest" (pdf), produced by the the Civil Society Institute's Boston Action Research project in cooperation with Environmental Working Group (EWG) and Midwest Environmental Advocates (MEA).

Analysts estimate that fracking operations will use 95 billion pounds of sand this year, up 30 percent from last year and 50 percent higher than initial forecasts. The sand, which must be uniform in shape and the grains able to withstand enormous pressures at great depth underground, is currently mined most heavily in Wisconsin and Minnesota, though the report identifies sand deposits in 12 others states (including New York, North Carolina, Maine, and Virginia) that could be affected as fracking demand grows. Wisconsin alone is on track to extract 50 million tons of frac sand a year—the equivalent of 9,000 semi-truck loads a day.
"Citizens living near frac sand mining in Wisconsin are witnessing a massive destruction of their rural landscape."
—Kimberlee Wright, Midwest Environmental Advocates

The mining process, which involves blasting off the soil, rock, and vegetation above a sand deposit, then washing, drying, and storing the excavated sand, uses between 420 thousand and 2 million gallons of water per day, according to the report, potentially drawing down groundwater supplies. In addition, the use of added chemicals when processing the sand could lead to contaminated run-off in nearby streams and wetlands.

 Even more troubling is the release of fine particulate matter, such as silica dust, at mining sites and in the surrounding areas. Frac sand mining produces "very small and very dangerous dust particles," the report reads, which have been linked to respiratory infections, lung cancer, and cardiovascular disease. While air samples have shown particle pollution around mining sites exceeds safe levels, there is little regulation of these emissions. "[M]onitoring of this rapidly expanding industry has been outpaced by the rate of development," the authors note.

"None of the states at the center of the current frac sand mining boom have adopted air quality standards for silica that will adequately protect the tens of thousands of people living or working near the scores of recently opened or proposed mining sites," said EWG's executive director Heather White. "EWG's mapping research found frac sand sites in close proximity to schools, hospitals and clinics, where children and patients may be exposed to airborne silica. Chronic exposure can lead to emphysema and lung disease. We need strong state action to protect the public health from yet another troubling side effect of the unprecedented wave of shale gas development."

Other economic impacts are harder to measure but no less important to consider. The report raises questions about how frac sand mining operations affect property values, infrastructure costs, and demands on health care providers, cautioning towns and local communities to "exercise precaution" when evaluating potential sites in their region.

"Citizens living near frac sand mining in Wisconsin are witnessing a massive destruction of their rural landscape," said MEA executive director Kimberlee Wright. "Elected officials and our states' natural resources protection agency have largely dismissed local citizens' concerns about their health, the health of their environment and their quality of life. Without a clearer view of the big picture of frac sand mining's impact, laws that protect our communities' air and water aren't being developed or enforced."

The other end of the shale gas extraction cycle is no less toxic. A separate peer-reviewed study, published earlier this week in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science and Technology, suggests fracking wastewater can endanger drinking water even after it has passed through treatment plants and been diluted.
According to UPI:
Most fracking operations store their wastewater in holding ponds. Eventually, that water is filtered through municipal or commercial treatment plants and emptied into rivers, lakes and ponds.
But new research suggests that wastewater contaminants, when subjected to traditional treatment methods like chlorination or ozonation, encourage toxic byproducts.
Researchers with the American Chemical Society found that even extremely diluted wastewater can still produce these byproducts during the treatment process. Scientists say their findings suggest regulators and energy officials should be more careful about which surface waters treated wastewater is emptied into.
The scientists and engineers from Duke and Stanford Universities used water samples from Pennsylvania and Arkansas frack sites.

 “The drinking water facilities should be aware of this,” said Bill Mitch, a lead author on the study and an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. “You need a lot of dilution to make these discharges no longer matter.”

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
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NATIONAL report - very important that this information be distributed to all governmental officials, and to all citizens across the nation.

The thorough NATIONAL report produced as a joint effort by Civil Society Institute, Midwest Environmental Advocates, and Environmental Working Group was released today at noon. It is very important that this information be distributed to all governmental officials, all newspaper and news media personnel, and to all citizens across the nation.  I was unable to send out the news release from Boston because of a computer problem, but all references can be found at this site.

http://www.americancleanenergyagenda.org/new-frac-sand-mining-report-details-health-environmental-and-economic-harms/

Links to all the resources can be found at this site including the map based links from EWG and references at MEA.  Please take a look at these well documented resources. Look for the address for a buffering replay of the press conference held at noon on Sept. 25. It is noted on the above link.


Report coauthor Grant Smith, senior energy policy adviser, Civil Society Institute, said:  “The rapid expansion in the United States of oil and shale gas drilling, including hydraulic fracturing, has a hidden side filled with problems: the mining of the special sand that is essential to fracking a drilled well.  As this report makes clear, it is essential that local and state governments assess and take action based on the impacts of the full cycle of shale oil and gas drilling, including frac sand mining.  Health, water, and other economic concerns should be addressed comprehensively, rather than being ignored or dismissed. Protecting public health and safety is the first responsibility of government.” 
 
EWG Executive Director Heather White said:  “None of the states at the center of the current frac sand mining boom have adopted air quality standards for silica that will adequately protect the tens of thousands of people living or working near the scores of recently opened or proposed mining sites. EWG’s mapping research found frac sand sites in close proximity to schools, hospitals and clinics, where children and patients may be exposed to airborne silica. Chronic exposure can lead to emphysema and lung disease. We need strong state action to protect the public health from yet another troubling side effect of the unprecedented wave of shale gas development.”
 
MEA Executive Director Kimberlee Wright said: “Citizens living near frac sand mining in Wisconsin are witnessing a massive destruction of their rural landscape. Elected officials and our states' natural resources protection agency have largely dismissed local citizens' concerns about their health, the health of their environment and their quality of life. Without a clearer view of the big picture of frac sand mining's impact, laws that protect our communities' air and water aren't being developed or enforced.”
 
Key concerns about frac sand mining outlined in the report include the following:
 
·              Water issues. Individual mining operations withdraw between 420 thousand and 2 million gallons per day.  The volume of water used is significant, and added chemicals to process the sand compound water related problems with sand mining.  Polyacrylamide, a flocculent, that encourages clumping of particles to remove impurities from the sand is used at mining and processing operations.  It contains traces of acrylamide and can break down into acrylamide, a neurotoxin and known carcinogen, and can enter groundwater or surface water from wastewater ponds at mining operations or from piles of processed sand ready to be transported. There is also increasing concern with acid mine runoff from operating and reclaimed frac sand mines. 
 
·              Health issues.  Silica dust is of great concern to people living near frac sand operations.  The smallest particles of dust (2.5 microns, a fraction of the width of a human hair) cause the greatest damage to the lungs.  This is due to the fact that smaller particles can evade the body’s natural defense mechanisms and penetrate deeper into the lungs, and even into the bloodstream.  Crystalline silica dust, generally around 4 microns in diameter or less, is also especially harmful.  Prolonged exposure to frac sand can lead to silicosis of the lungs and is thought to be a lung carcinogen. This is particularly troubling for people living in proximity to multiple frac sand mines as well as elderly people or families with young children as these populations may be more susceptible to disease.  Additionally, people with silicosis are at high risk for developing tuberculosis. Crystalline silica exposure has been linked with other lung ailments as well, including emphysema and bronchitis. It has also been linked with a variety of autoimmune diseases, such as scleroderma, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, autoimmune hemolytic anemia, chronic thyroiditis, hyperthyroidism, and to kidney-related diseases, such as chronic renal disease, and those with high exposure are more likely to die from renal disease.
 
·              Financial issues.  Economic harms are seen as a result of frac sand mining including potential loss of nearby real estate values of up to 25 percent and decreased lifespan for roads and other infrastructure, which carry a substantial replacement cost.   Even though Minnesota state law allows counties to levy a 15-cent per ton aggregate extraction tax to help offset the costs of road repair, many counties choose not to.  Additionally, the Minnesota Local Research Board found that 22 cents per ton-mile would be a more accurate amount to cover the costs.
 
Commenting on the health aspects of the report, Crispin Pierce, PhD, associate professor and program director, Environmental Public Health Program, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, said:  “Our research group has tested the air around frac sand plants over the last five years and found elevated levels of fine airborne particulates including silica in neighboring communities. We are concerned about potential increases in cardiovascular disease, premature death, and lung cancer. Our state regulator, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, is requiring less than 10 percent of the 140 frac sand operations in the state to monitor their emissions, and even then not requiring monitoring of the particulates of most concern, including silica.”
 
Silica, or silicon dioxide, is a chemical compound that is most commonly found in nature as quartz.  Crystalline silica is an ultrafine particle that occurs when silica is crushed, exploded, drilled or chipped, as occurs during silica mining.  Crystalline silica can be ingested through breathing, allowing the particles to become lodged in the lungs. In addition to the danger posed to miners and pad workers, frac sand also carries a potential risk to residents near mining sites, along transport routes, and for the transport crews who move the cargo. Intense exposure to crystalline silica can cause silicosis within a year, but it usually takes at least 10-15 years of exposure before symptoms occur. 
 
Among those concerned about the health impacts are Victoria Trinko, a family farmer from Bloomer, Wisconsin in Chippewa County less than a mile from a frac sand mining operation, said:  “I am a retired speech clinician raising beef cattle on the farm my father bought in 1936.  I am also the clerk of the Town of Cooks Valley.  I have lived on the family farm most of my life. The third sand company in the Town of Cooks Valley began construction and operation in the spring of 2011 and is located within one half mile northwest of my farm … In April of 2012 within 9 months of the construction of this silica sand mine, I developed an intermittent sore throat and raspy voice.  In September of 2012, I visited my doctor who referred me to a pulmonary specialist. In October 2012, I was diagnosed with asthma due to my environment and use an inhalant and nasal spray twice a day to alleviate my breathing symptoms.”
 
In outlining a wide variety of possible industry, state and local responses to the impacts of frac sand mining, the report notes:  “Perhaps the best response to the rapid expansion of shale gas extraction is to take a step back and view the entire shale gas fuel cycle more holistically.  The questions, if properly posed, can assist us in defining the issues, challenges, and consequences of the shale gas fuel cycle.  They will also help answer whether or not the shale gas revolution is of benefit to all of us or just some of us, and determine the long-term viability of the shale-gas economy.  In pursuing this exercise, the scope of questions should not remain at some national or geopolitical strategic level.” 
 
The report continues:  “Rather, they should also address the consequences of the shale gas fuel cycle for people at the local level including the consequences for their property, their businesses, their cultural values and way of life, their health, their access to adequate supplies of clean water, the impact on local infrastructure, as well as the sustainability of their community’s economy in the near- and long-term.  Of course, such questions should have been posed long ago.  Powerful economic forces are churning ahead without pause or consideration of the implications of shale gas extraction for our country and our citizens.” 
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Saturday, August 9, 2014

Wall Street Journal article: "Demand for Sand Takes Off Thanks to Fracking--Companies Race to Build New Mines as Prices Rise"

"Demand for Sand Takes Off Thanks to Fracking--Companies Race to Build New Mines as Prices Rise"

Frackers are expected to use nearly 95 billion pounds of sand this year. A sand mine in Garnavillo, Iowa. Stephen Mally for The Wall Street Journal

Sand prices are rising and companies are racing to build new mines in South Dakota and other locations as demand intensifies for the silica crystals that energy companies use to frack oil and gas wells.

Sand is a key ingredient in items from solar panels to smartphones, but in recent years billions of pounds of it have been poured down wells to help coax more fuel out of the ground. In hydraulic fracturing, sand is mixed in a slurry of water and chemicals, then pumped down a hole to crack open dense rocks so oil and gas can escape to the surface.

Frackers are expected to use nearly 95 billion pounds of sand this year, up nearly 30% from 2013 and up 50% from forecasts made by energy-consulting firm PacWest Consulting Partners a year ago.

It can take four million pounds of sand to frack a single well, but several companies are experimenting with using more. Companies like Pioneer Natural Resources Inc., PXD -5.32% which recently received a ruling from the U.S. Commerce Department allowing it to export unrefined ultralight oil produced from shale formations, are finding that the output of wells is up to 30% higher when they're blasted with more sand. About a fifth of onshore wells are now being fracked with extra sand, but the technique could expand to 80% of all shale wells, according to energy analysts at RBC Capital Markets.



That's great news for sand miners, but it's heating up competition between energy buyers and other big industrial users.

U.S. Silica Holdings Inc., SLCA -1.17% one of the largest industrial-sand companies, has already raised prices for some frack sand, and it said recently that it would also start charging 10% to 20% more for the finer grades of sand typically used to make glass and various industrial products as it diverts some of this supply to oil producers. The best sand is dubbed Northern White because the round crystal, which can withstand serious heat and pressure underground, is found in states like Wisconsin and Minnesota. The company expects demand for sand will be at least 25% higher than supply for the rest of this year.

"Northern White is in short supply, so people are using basically whatever they can get their hands on to complete their wells," said Michael Lawson, a spokesman for U.S. Silica.

Oil companies' insatiable appetite has even generated renewed interest in second-tier deposits of lower-quality brown sand in places like Texas and Arkansas.

Preferred Sands, which announced last month it has received backing from private-equity firm KKR KKR -0.81% & Co., plans to increase sand production by next summer with new and expanded mines in places like Wisconsin and Minnesota, said Chief Executive Michael O'Neill, though he added that it's becoming tough to find available railcars to move the sand from mines to oil fields.

Jamie Weinstein, co-head of KKR's special solutions team, said the trend toward using more sand per well will mean sand producers will keep growing. The firm is extending $680 million in debt and equity to Preferred Sands to restructure the company's balance sheet.

"We believe the incremental demand for sand over time is only going to increase," Mr. Weinstein said.

Frack-sand producers are hot stocks. Emerge Energy Services EMES +0.48% LP was last year's most successful public offering, according to Dealogic, with a share price that has shot up 558% since its debut. Investors want more. They may get it from private-equity-backed Fairmount Minerals, a major U.S. sand miner, which has enlisted bankers to explore an IPO, according to people familiar with the matter.

Laura Fulton, chief financial officer of Hi-Crush Partners L.P., is predicting another 5%-to-10% increase in sand prices before year's end. Hi-Crush recently signed seven new long-term contracts at higher prices—and for greater volumes—with oil-field service firms including Halliburton Co. HAL -3.22% , which help exploration outfits pump more oil and gas.

"There's really no limit on the demand side," she said.

But there are growing restraints on sand supplies. By the end of this year, new and expanded mines capable of producing 10 million pounds of sand annually will be up and running, but future projects could face delays, Cowen & Co. analyst Marc Bianchi said.

Dozens of new sand-mine permits were issued over the last three to four years in places like Wisconsin, Minnesota and Illinois, triggering a massive public backlash about the truck traffic, dust and breathing problems these operations can create. Now many state and county-level health officials are trying to slow the sector's expansion.

A few companies are skirting those efforts by teaming up with towns hungry for jobs and tax dollars, as well as more regulatory control. In Wisconsin, the cities of Independence and White Hall last year annexed land in Trempealeau County so that Hi-Crush could move ahead with its new mine. Those cities' zoning rules governing sand operations supersede the county's regulations, including its temporary ban on permits, so Hi- Crush's site can go into service later this year. Local officials in Minnesota and Illinois are taking similar steps.

As the good sand becomes increasingly difficult to find, one company is turning next door to South Dakota. Pat Galvin is chief executive of South Dakota Proppants LLC, which aims to resurrect a 1950s-era mine on federal lands about 40 miles from Mount Rushmore. Located in the Black Hills National Forest, the abandoned mine is filled with the same type of high-quality sand frackers have come to count on, and it could generate up to one million tons annually, he said.

The company is getting ready to pull together an environmental-impact statement to present to the federal government, which controls the site. But oil companies are already asking about supply contracts, Mr. Galvin said. The proximity to fracking operations in North Dakota's Bakken formation and Colorado's Niobrara Shale could trim delivery costs by as much as $50 a ton, he said.

The South Dakota site has another key advantage: no neighbors. And shipments can be routed to avoid tourists bustling around Mount Rushmore.

"We're in the middle of nowhere compared to Wisconsin, where you've got farming and everything else going on," Mr. Galvin said.

—Ryan Dezember contributed to this article.

Write to Alison Sider at alison.sider@wsj.com
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