Marcellus Shale Fracking – Transloading Bulk Materials for Marcellus Shale Drilling

Archive for the ‘Fracture Sand’ Category

The use of fracking sand is specific for the natural gas and oil exploration field. This is the material that keeps the fissures opened in the rock bed once the pressure is released from either hydrofracking or propane fracking.

The reason this material is used is because of its physical properties. The sand itself is very dense and round in shape. This gives it strength against crushing. Since the particles are small and only become loosely packed when in the well, it is very permeable that allows the oil and natural gas to be extracted. Both of these qualities are what are needed to keep a fracture in the rock bed open thousands of feet below the surface.
There are three basic types of sand that are used for this purpose.

1) – Northern Sand or Brady Sand comes from Santrol of Fairmount Minerals that is transloaded from Wexford Lake Sand in Yuma, Michigan.  It is a high silica content 40 – 70 mesh.

2) – Ottawa sand is generally 95% or greater SiO2 and is very spherical in shape. The size of this sand can vary from 12 to 270 on the Tyler mesh scale. The quarries this sand comes from are located in the northeastern part of the United States and Canada.

3) -  Texas or brown sand. This has higher silica content, generally around 99% SiO2, but is not spherical in shape. The irregularity of the shape does allow for this type of sand to be more permeable than Ottawa sand by some well operators. The size of sand that can be purchased for fracking is from 8 to 100 on the Tyler mesh scale. These deposits are located in the southern part of America concentrated in the state of Texas.

For many well operators, the specific kind of sand they use is dictated by the region of the country they are located in. This is due to the economical cost of transporting the fracking sand over long distances. Both do a sufficient job for the purpose they are called on to do and are used in 90% of all wells in the United States.

Contact the sponsor of this Blog, Tran-Z, for your frack sand needs.

Read our previous article on fracking sand:

The fracking methods that are deployed by the natural gas and oil explorers only involve two similar kinds. There is hydrofracking and propane fracking. Both use a similar slurry of frac sand and surfactant of about 0.5% of the overall components, but the main component is where the difference lies.

Hydrofracking involves the use of water as the main fluid source. This is a known substance that is non-toxic and non-hazardous to use and work with. This method involves a slurry mixture of 99.5% water and the remainder consisting of frac sand and surfactants. This slurry is pumped down into the borehole of the well at 100 barrels a minute, and the fracking pressure can be as high as 15,000 psi to crack the rock bed below. The fracking medium is recovered after the rock bed is cracked. The water returns to the surface and is held in a collection pond close to the borehole.

Propane fracking involves the same components but instead of water, a LPG in gel form is used. This, too, is non-hazardous and non-toxic while it is in gel form. Once it becomes a gas, there is a flammability issue that has to be addressed. The main difference is the way the medium is recovered. The LPG gel evaporates after the pressure is released, and the gas is contained in a tank instead of a pond.

This procedure has been used for over 60 years in the natural gas and oil exploration. What most people are unaware of is that it has other uses that have been deployed for the same amount of time. The most common is the use of fracking to stimulate a groundwater well. There has been some debate over the use of hydrofracking and what it is doing to the ground water, but they forget this is the method that is used to keep old water wells functioning.

Other uses include the use of fracking to help carve out mines, and for the tunnel construction for roads and railroads. This is a far safer method than with the use of dynamite.

The fracking methods that are being deployed today have many beneficial uses that include more than just extending the recovery efforts of the natural gas and oil wells.

The use of sand for fracking in the oil and natural gas industry is a necessary piece of the puzzle. Fracking is a process where water and/ or VOCs are injected into a borehole to assist in the extraction of more oil and gas when normal conditions cause the flow to decrease.

When this process was first used nearly a century ago, mainly water alone was injected into the boreholes. Today, the process has been modified because improved techniques have been developed. With advances in vertical drilling, boreholes can penetrate more surface area of a rock layer. This allows for more of the shale rock formation to be exposed to the pressure that will commence the cracking or fracking of the rock.

This process worked very efficiently, but once the rocks were cracked, these fissures would close when the pressure was released. This is why sand has been introduced to form a slurry with the water before it is injected into the borehole. The sand might be small, but has enough density to withstand the crushing force of the rock once the pressure is released.

By keeping the fracture open, the sand allows for additional oil and gas that had been previously trapped to flow to the surface for recovery by the well crew. There are different sizes of fracking sand available in America.

The two most commonly used ones are the Northern Sand and the Brady Sand. The northern sand is found in the northern US states and is more spherical in shape. It can be purchased in 12/20, 16/30, 24/40, and 40/70 mesh sizes. Brady sand can be found in Texas, which as a less consistent shape but still meets the requirements of the industry. It comes in 8/16, 12/20, 16/30, and 20/40 mesh sizes.

These two sources of sand for fracking are both being used in the Marcellus Shale region to assist with oil and natural gas production.

The Marcellus Shale sand suppliers offer clean and specific size material for the necessary process of fracking a well. The big three in the United States is Badger Mining Corporation out of Wisconsin, Unimin from Connecticut, and Oglebay Norton located in Ohio. Each of these companies ships their sand across the nation and to the Marcellus region.

Many in the gas business are used to working with particular types and sizes of sand. For this reason, there are different classifications in which the sands will be placed.

There is the white Ottawa or northern sand. Many favor this sand from the northern parts of the US due to its mono crystalline structure and high roundness and sphericity that are consistent throughout. These characteristics of the sand gives it  a strength to resist crushing far superior to most other types of sands in the world.

The origin of this sand is from granite rock that has eroded over time and left these deposits that have formed over a million years ago. The deposits are in Minnesota and Wisconsin and come in a variety of sizes. The size is measured by the sieve they will go through and these are 12/20, 16/30, 24/40, and 40/70 mesh sizes.

There is another brown or Brady sand that originates out of Texas. Like the name indicates, it has a slightly darker appearance and is considered less pure by some in the drilling field. Despite this, it meets or exceeds the requirements for frack sand set by the API. While white sand is considered spherical, this is more angular in shape. The most commonly used sizes of the brown sand are 8/16, 12/20, 16/30, and 20/40 mesh sizes.

Both of these types of sand are used in the Marcellus Shale region when fracking of a well is underway. The companies that are the Marcellus Shale sand suppliers weigh in the amount you are going to use along with desired grade when determining the price.

When your company needs fracking sand contact the sponsor of this blog, TranZ for rail and trucking services delivered to your drilling site.

When the term fracking is used in the oil and gas industry, it is referring to the process called hydraulic fracturing. This process involves the use of a liquid, usually water, being injected into a well to break or fracture the rock bed below. This fracturing of the rock allows more of the oil and gas that is deposited there to be extracted.

This method to extract more of the energy reserves that are below ground has been used for more than 60 years on more than 1 million wells across America. The cracks in the rock are so small they are referred to as micro cracks. Because their size is so small and the weight of the material that is pressing down on them make them close unless they are kept open by an artificial means. This is usually done with sand particles or ceramic particles.

This process is very common when the reservoirs are in a low permeable formation. This is a common situation for the natural gas wells in which 90% of them use this hydraulic fracturing technique. Locating the micro fractures is done with micro seismic monitoring. This is done with the aid of sensors that are placed near the wellbore. This way, the orientation and size of the fractures can be identified and mapped out for extraction purposes.

The pressure at which this process is conducted can reach up to 15,000 psi. This effectively cracks the rock bed and with the particles that are in the slurry in place in these cracks, the oil and gas is allowed to permeate out. This fracking allows for more of the reservoir to be recovered and used by the American people as a domestic energy source.

A sand silo is important to many different users of sand for different reasons. For use at golf courses, they help keep the sand dry and free of debris. This is important to keeping the sand traps functioning properly and so they have a good appearance.

These are elevated silos that a tractor and wagon can pull under and load up a needed supply on. This is what most people think of when referring to a silo, just like the grain silos that are scattered across America.

For use in the energy industry, there is a new type of silo in use. This is the vertical silo. They are still round like the ones on the farm, but lay on their side. This makes them easy to transport to the oil and gas fields. They are of an all-steel construction surrounded by a heavy duty steel skid that allows for them to be transported and positioned easily without breaching the contents of the silo.

The loading of these silos is done through a top hatch that also allows for visual inspection of the contents. The gates that control the openings are hydraulically actuated for precise control of the contents. The pneumatic lines are attached so the sand can be delivered to the drilling platform when it is needed in the hydraulic fracturing of the area beneath the ground.

Since this sand is kept in an enclosed environment, it is free of debris and will flow to the crevasse where it is needed to help keep them open and the oil or gas can then flow to be recovered at the surface.

A sand silo is a common site at energy fields since over 60% of all oil and gas fields use hydraulic fracturing to recover as much of the reserves that are left trapped in the ground by conventional drilling techniques.