Minnesota Sand Company clarifies information about proposed sand mine near New Albin at public meeting

by Bob Beach

The Minnesota Sand Company, LLC hosted an informational meeting Tuesday, October 16 at the New Albin Community Center regarding the company’s proposed sand mining operations in Allamakee County. Geoff Griffin, a civil engineer contracted by Minnesota Sand as the project engineer, said that he has been investigating the feasibility of three potential mine sites in Allamakee County, including the 11-acre parcel five miles southwest of New Albin owned by Dave Mitchell, known locally as Sand Cove.
Griffin said that the mining project on the Mitchell property is still in the planning stages and that after meeting with Allamakee County Engineer Brian Ridenour, Minnesota Sand had withdrawn its conditional use permit application for the mine in order to allow time to work with the County Engineer on potential truck routes and necessary road improvements.
Griffin said mine sites had been chosen in Allamakee County because the sandstone desirable to the oil and gas industry is close to the surface and the sand has the uniformity, roundness, grain size and crush resistance that make it ideal for frac mining of oil and natural gas.
He said that sand used in the frac mining process has very large grains, 210 to 280 microns in diameter, not the very small grains of less than 10 microns that can cause silicosis. The very fine grains don’t prop open the fractures created during the frac mining process, he explained. He added that the sand extracted during the mining process is typically moist, so dust produced during that process would be minimal.
The mining process, Griffin explained, involves first removing the top soil, which would be used to create berms around the mine and saved for later use during the reclamation process for the land. Once the top soil has been removed, the course sand layer would be extracted using bulldozers and backhoes, loaded into trucks and transported to a processing station (in either Winona, MN or Clayton) where the sand would be washed, dried and loaded into rail cars for transport.
Ultimately, a rock layer, a layer of course sand and a layer of medium-grain sand would be removed, reducing a 100-foot hill to a 30-foot plateau. The land would then be reclaimed according to the land owner’s wishes, either as tillable land, pasture or forest land.
Griffin said that no crushing machinery would be used during the process and that blasting would be used very little, if at all, to remove rock caps. He said the only noise produced at the site would be from the machinery used, which would be mitigated by the top soil berms and the natural topography of the area. The noise at the property line, he said, was expected to be no louder than 65 decibels, the approximate volume of a normal conversation.
Traffic to and from the mine would include 10 to 20 trucks per hour from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m., Griffin said. He said the driveway and entrance to the mine would be cleaned daily and that the mining company would work with the County Engineer on haul routes. He said that an agreement with the County regarding necessary road improvements would be included in the conditional use permit application and the cost of those improvements would be paid by the company.
Griffin said that the proposed mine would have little, if any, impact on surface and groundwater because the sand layers being mined are 40 to 50 feet above the water table, unlike mines in Wisconsin where ponds are required. He added that because of the quality of the sand, it would not be necessary to have wash plants at the mining site, so very little water would be used. He said he anticipated that water would only be used at the sites for dust control along the truck haul routes.
Griffin said that the purpose of Tuesday’s meeting was to provide general information about mining operations but that more meetings would be scheduled to address specific proposed mining operations.