Sand From Minnesota Used For Hydraulic Fracturing In The Bakken - KXNet - Bismarck/Minot/Williston/Dickinson

Frac sand used in North Dakota's Bakken might soon be difficult to get.

Protesters gather today at the Minnesota State Capitol as lawmakers discuss putting restrictions on frac sand mining.

Much of the frac sand used in North Dakota's Bakken comes from Minnesota.

<<"It's an absolute critical role we cannot make the Bakken and Three Forks produce without sand," Director of Mineral Resources Lynn Helms said.

One of the key ingredients to unlock North Dakota's oil, comes from out of state.

"North Dakota receives a lot of its sand from the sand mines in Minnesota and Wisconsin and certainly the Bakken is dependent on that sand," Ron Ness with the North Dakota Petroleum Council said.

Many Minnesota residents are upset about how digging for this sand is changing the landscape of their state.

If it's not available in a neighboring state like Minnesota, it might be hard to transport the sand economically from somewhere else.

"The frac sand would have to come from a long ways away, transportation costs would go up significantly, the overall cost of putting a well in production would go up," Helms said.

Director of Mineral Resources, Lynn Helms says North Dakota consumes about 2 million tons of sand a year.

"The value of that is about 500 million dollars or a half a billion dollars a year that we consume in western North Dakota," Helms said.

"They've got a perfect round hard sand over there that's perfect little symmetrical pieces of sand that's worked out great in the Bakken," Ness said.

The sand is primarily used for hydraulic fracturing, and more and more sand is being used just for that every year.

"Even as we've added more and more ceramic propent to the hydraulic fracturing process the amount of frac sand has been increasing year on year by 50 to 100 percent, cause we're adding stages to the hydraulic fracturing so every well is adding more ceramic and frac sand," Helms said.

So as long as the Bakken continues to grow, so will the need for frac sand.>>

Helms says the sand is used in every single hydraulic fracturing job in the Bakken.