In the Name of Fracking: The Sand Mines of Wisconsin

In this trou­bling spring, Wisconsin’s prairies and farm­land fanned out to undu­lat­ing hills that cra­dled the land and its peo­ple. Within their embrace, the rack­ety calls of geese echoed from ice-free ponds, bald eagles wheeled in the sky, and deer leaped in the brush. And for the first time in my life, I heard the thrilling war­ble of sand­hill cranes.

Yet this peace­ful rural land­scape is swiftly becom­ing part of a vast assem­bly line in the cor­po­rate race for the last fos­sil fuels on the planet. The tar­get: the sand in the land of the cranes.

Five hun­dred mil­lion years ago, an ocean surged here, shap­ing a unique wealth of hills and bluffs that, under man­tles of green­ery and trees, are sand­stone. That sand­stone con­tains a par­tic­u­larly pure form of crys­talline sil­ica. Its grains, per­fectly rounded, are strong enough to resist the extreme pres­sures of the tech­nol­ogy called hydraulic frac­tur­ing, which pumps vast quan­ti­ties of that sand, as well as water and chem­i­cals, into ancient shale for­ma­tions to force out methane and other forms of “nat­ural gas.”

That sand, which props open frac­tures in the shale, has to come from some­where. Without it, the frack­ing indus­try would grind to a halt. So big multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions are descend­ing on this bucolic region to cart off its pre­his­toric sand, which will later be force­fully injected into the earth else­where across the coun­try to pro­duce more nat­ural gas. Geology that has taken mil­lions of years to form is now being trans­formed into part of a sys­tem, a machine, help­ing to drive global cli­mate change.

“The val­leys will be filled … the moun­tains and hills made level”

Boom times for hydraulic frac­tur­ing began in 2008 when new horizontal-drilling meth­ods trans­formed an indus­try for­merly depen­dent on strictly ver­ti­cal bor­ing. Frac-sand min­ing took off in tan­dem with this development.

“It’s huge,” said a U.S. Geological Survey min­eral com­mod­ity spe­cial­ist in 2009. “I’ve never seen any­thing like it, the growth. It makes my head spin.” That year, from all U.S. sources, frac-sand pro­duc­ers used or sold over 6.5 mil­lion met­ric tons of sand—about what the Great Pyramid of Giza weighs. Last month, Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources Senior Manager and Special Projects Coordinator Tom Woletz said cor­po­ra­tions were haul­ing at least 15 mil­lion met­ric tons a year from the state’s hills.

By July 2011, between 22 and 36 frac-sand facil­i­ties in Wisconsin were either oper­at­ing or approved. Seven months later, said Woletz, there were over 60 mines and 45 pro­cess­ing (refine­ment) plants in oper­a­tion. “By the time your arti­cle appears, these fig­ures will be obso­lete,” claims Pat Popple, who in 2008 founded the first group to oppose frac-sand min­ing, Concerned Chippewa Citizens (now part of The Save the Hills Alliance).

Jerry Lausted, a retired teacher and also a farmer, showed me the tawny ridges of sand that delin­eated a strip mine near the town of Menomonie where he lives. “If we were look­ing from the air,” he added, “you’d see ponds in the bot­tom of the mine where they dump the indus­trial waste water. If you scan to the left, you’ll see the hills that are going to disappear.”

Those hills are gigan­tic sponges, absorb­ing water, fil­ter­ing it, and pro­vid­ing the region’s aquifer with the purest water imag­in­able. According to Lausted, sand min­ing takes its toll on “air qual­ity, water qual­ity and quan­tity. Recreational aspects of the com­mu­nity are dam­aged. Property val­ues [are low­ered.] But the big thing is, you’re remov­ing the hills that you can’t replace. They’re a huge water man­u­fac­tur­ing fac­tory that Mother Nature gave us, and they’re gone.”

It’s impos­si­ble to grasp the scope of the dev­as­ta­tion from the road, but aer­ial videos and pho­tographs reveal vast, bleak, sandy waste­lands punc­tu­ated with waste ponds and indus­trial instal­la­tions where Wisconsin hills once stood.

When cor­po­ra­tions apply to coun­ties for min­ing per­mits, they must file “recla­ma­tion” plans. But Larry Schneider, a retired met­al­lur­gist and indus­trial con­sul­tant with a spe­cial­ized knowl­edge of min­ing, calls the recla­ma­tion process “an absolute farce.”

Reclamation projects by min­ing cor­po­ra­tions since the 1970s may have made mined areas “look a lit­tle less than an absolute waste­land,” he observes. “But did they rein­tro­duce the bio­di­ver­sity? Did they rein­tro­duce the beauty and the ecol­ogy? No.”

Studies [PDF] bear out his ver­dict. “Every year,” wrote Mrinal Ghose in the Journal of Scientific and Industrial Research [PDF], “large areas are con­tin­u­ally becom­ing unfer­tile in spite of efforts to grow veg­e­ta­tion on the degraded mined land.”

Awash in promises of cor­po­rate jobs and easy money, those who lease and sell their land just shrug. “The land­scape is gonna change when it’s all said and done,” says dairy farmer Bobby Schindler, who in 2008 leased his land in Chippewa County to a frac-sand com­pany called Canadian Sand and Proppant. (EOG, the for­mer Enron, has since taken over the lease.) “Instead of being a hill it’s gonna be a val­ley, but all seeded down, and you’d never know there’s a mine there unless you were famil­iar with the area.”

Of the min­ing he adds, “It’s really put a boost to the area. It’s impres­sive the amount of money that’s exchang­ing hands.” Eighty-four-year-old Letha Webster, who sold her land 100 miles south of Schindler’s to another min­ing cor­po­ra­tion, Unimin, says that leav­ing her home of 56 years is “just the price of progress.”

Jamie and Kevin Gregar—both 30-something native Wisconsinites and mil­i­tary veterans—lived in a trailer and saved their money so that they could set­tle down in a pas­toral par­adise once Kevin returned from Iraq. In January 2011, they found a dream home near tiny Tunnel City. (The vil­lage takes its name from a nearby rail tun­nel.) “It’s just gorgeous—the hills, the trees, the wood­land, the ani­mals,” says Jamie. “It’s perfect.”

Five months after they moved in, she learned that neigh­bors had leased their land to “a sand mine” com­pany. “What’s a sand mine?” she asked.

Less than a year later, they know all too well. The Gregars’ land is now sur­rounded on three sides by an unsightly panorama of min­ing prepa­ra­tions. Unimin is uproot­ing trees, goug­ing out top­soil, and tear­ing down the nearby hills. “It looks like a dis­as­ter zone, like a bomb went off,” Jamie tells me.

When I men­tion her ser­vice to her coun­try, her voice breaks. “I am dev­as­tated. We’ve done every­thing right. We’ve done every­thing we were sup­posed to. We just wanted to raise our fam­ily in a good loca­tion and have good neigh­bors and to have it taken away from us for some­thing we don’t sup­port … ” Her voice trails off in tears.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at Grist.org.