We wouldn’t have a sand shortage if we didn’t have too much fracking

 August 2, 2022

You might not have thought that you'd be thinking about the role of sand as a commodity, but you may very well be. Remarkably, there is a shortage of sand on the market. Sand is used in a lot more cases than you might expect, like concrete and glass of course, but also in metalworking for polishing. But it's not like we're using massively more sand in construction or metalworking. So what's going on?

The basically unspoken fact is that the significant factor in the increase in sand use is due to the use of sand in fracking operations. Fracking operations use a lot of sand, and the increase in fracking in the past decade or so has led to a shortage in the supply of commodity sand. Sand is basically wasted in fracking operations: it either can't be re-used when it's pulled out of the ground or it's left in the ground. 

What is not the cause of this shortage is this new and green use case of sand, which is in thermal batteries. Thermal batteries use not so much sand, and provide a simple and effective method of storing wind and solar energy for use in the off-peak hours. There are actually a lot of "simple" types of batteries that can store energy effectively enough at scale not to have to rely solely on the most efficient lithium-ion batteries: liquid salt and thermal sand batteries are two examples; and there is no reason that wind and solar energy can't be sorted in gravity-fed hydropower systems. 

But the sand shortage is evidence that the fossil fuel system is collaterally wasteful in ways we clearly didn't expect as well as collaterally polluted. I don't want to only focus on this; this should be common sense to anyone. 

What is making someone like me care about this above and beyond the economic analysis is the strange effect this demand for sand is having on communities in the Midwest, especially Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. They've been taking so much sand out of mines that weren't very busy before, that it's having deletrious effects on communities. Solastalgia feels abound, as well as this feeling that it's such a strange environmental problem to try to communicate: giant holes in places, some of them on shorelines and so forth. It's been hard to convince people that it's happening, let alone at a scale that is so problematic. 

All this is not to mention that fracking operations have basically demanded the best quality of sand in order for them to waste in the fracking process. Showing, overall, that fracking has imposed a significant waste on the supply of sand by decreasing the available supply for other legitimate purposes, and specifically decreasing supply of the highest quality of sand. 

It's a stange commodity to be talking about, but over several years, it has started to appear to be a critical commodity. The problem is, however, that the construction trades are experiencing this as a critical shortage because we've been wasting the best of what we have on strained and unnecessary contortions to get fossil gas that is getting in the way of a faster and more successful transition to a green, and frankly it appears a more profitable, less convoluted energy system.