Sand

Commodity prices may not encourage too many rigs to rise in North America in the near-term, but as oil and gas producers experiment with longer laterals and increased fractures, there’s a bit more optimism among sand operators.

U.S. Silica Holdings Inc. is spending $210 million for an East Texas proppant sand facility to beef up its customer base in the Haynesville and Upper Eagle Ford shales and is eyeing an expansion into Oklahoma’s stacked reservoirs, CEO Bryan Shinn said Tuesday.

Nearly 40% of the proppant capacity in the U.S. drilling industry, an estimated 20 million tons of sand and resin-coated proppants (RCP), have been idled or reduced over the past year, leaving little wiggle room for growth this year, industry suppliers lamented during recent quarterly conference calls.

An Emerge Energy Services LP subsidiary has acquired 94 million tons of northern white silica sand reserves in Jackson County, WI, from a unit of Seventy Seven Energy Inc.

During the shale boom, companies jumped into the oil/gas patch because there was money to be made. Now it seems that there are more lessons to be learned than dollars earned.

Even with the drilling pullback, growth of the hydraulic fracturing (fracking) sand manufacturing business continues in Wisconsin, where it also presents a big growth opportunity for local natural gas distribution utilities, according to WEC Energy Group Inc. CEO Gale Klappa.

Despite depressed commodity prices, demand for proppant sand among Delaware Basin producers is strong, as evidenced by the recent arrival of what is said to be the largest frack sand unit train ever in North America at a Loving, NM, area terminal.

The pullback in the U.S. onshore has choked demand for all types of services, with proppant volumes declining sharply since the start of the year. Proppant providers are continuing to cut costs and are working with their customers to hold on to market share for the eventual upturn. As to when the market will strengthen, however, it’s anybody’s guess.

The United States will remain the world’s largest producer and consumer of frack sand for years, and the North American frack sand market is projected to grow by nearly 9% every year through 2016, according to a report by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).