 | This Week in Petroleum 9-12-07 | The Oil Drum | The Economics of Oil, Part II: Peak Oil and the Energy Supply Curve |  |
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A Truckstop Perspective
"Sand?" Surely I'd misunderstood. "You're hauling sand from Canada to Texas?"
"Yup," the driver said as he tasted his coffee. "There's pretty good pay in it, 'cept I had to deadhead up to Alberta to get it. I'll get a little extra fer that, at least."
I shook my head in disbelief. "Wouldn't it be cheaper to ship it by rail?"
"Prolly." He looked thoughtful, then shrugged. "Guess they don't have trains running close by where the sand is. It keeps movin' around, an' the railroads can't move around to keep up."
I took a moment to digest this. "Doesn't Texas have sand? Who in the world is paying for this?" An image of a Texas zillionaire rolling gleefully in sand came unbidden to my mind, and I forced it to the background.
"Well, there's different grades of sand, and I reckon this drillin' outfit needs this particular kind." He took another sip of coffee. "I think their name is Diamond somethin' or other."
I made a noncommittal noise as I tried to come up with a reply. "It's a crazy world."
"Got that right!" He grinned and waved on his way out the door.
Reminds me of a news story I read about Saudi Arabia importing sand. You'd think if there's one thing they'll never have to import, it's sand. But, as your trucker friend noted, it's the kind of sand.
Re: Sand to Saudi Arabia
I think I may have mentioned this on TOD quite some time ago. Circa 1971 I worked for a company that supplied water and wastewater treatment equipment. They had just won a big order from ARAMCO for sand filters to treat injection water. These filter require that the sand particles conform to a certain specified size range and uniformity (if the particles are too small, the filter plugs up too easily; if they are too large, the filtration effectiveness is impaired).
So, along with the order for the filters was an order for several hundred tons of properly graded filter sand. Evidently, at the time, the Saudis either didn't have the capability or the inclination to do sand particle size grading.
After that, our salesmen (no 'salespersons' at the time) used to brag that they were so good, they could sell sand to the Saudi Arabians.
A year or two back there was a shortage of sand for frac jobs in the Permian Basin. We had newly drilled wells sitting idle for months for lack of sand.And you are right, it had to be a very specific type of sand. One of our engineers was very passionate that we not accept substitutes the vendors had offered up as solutions. He was a good engineer, and I trusted his judgement, but until then I never thought of sand as a potential constraint to oil and gas operations.
While on the subject of sand, it is almost universally assumed that sand is essentially infinitely abundant. It is not. There are many regions of the country with little usable sand, thus requiring sand to be shipped in from other regions. If you are not near a seashore or an area with readily accessible alluvial deposits, chances are sand is probably not too plentiful in your area.
I discovered this fact sort of accidently a number of years ago while playing around with an invention to rapidly fill large fabric sand 'sausages' for emergency flood control, following the severe 1993 floods in the US Midwest. Not all parts of the Midwest have ready access to large sand deposits. (Anyway, due to potential patent problems, I chose not to pursue this idea any further. The next time there is a major flood, you will still see people manually filling sandbags, one by one, which is pretty absurb if you really think about it.)
it's a great idea though
--
All these memories will be lost in time
like tears in rain
More sand. After the local molybdenum mine shut to overseas competition, a sand outfit took up with expensive white sand for golf courses, private beaches. Priorities; it's trucked.
Anybody worked out a date for Peak Sand?
I would hope that they could truck it until they got to a train terminal that could take it down to Texas, then truck it from there to it's destination. I'm sure they could arrange it, but then you'd be dealing with 3 companies instead of just one. Likely the buyer doesn't care much about the price, so the guy arranging the shipping doesn't care either. Bad sourcing, IMHO.
~Durandal (http://www.wtdwtshtf.com/)
Some of this may be due to the "just-in-time" logistics. Any breakdown in train or river transport and you have to pay big bucks to truck in some commodity so that your whole process doesn't shut down.
I have a truck-driver friend who just switched jobs so he could be at home more. Used to drive long-haul but now drives a dump truck. He was told most of his deliveries would be local but he's found himself doing a lot of runs from SE Ohio to Pittsburgh (around 200 miles) with a load of coal or manganese alloy steel or even concrete. It seems crazy to truck heavy commodities in this way and especially so given the fact that SE Ohio and Pittsburgh are connected by the Ohio river and materials can be shipped very cheaply on the river. Of course, they cannot be shipped quickly on the river. The just-in-time system of logistics may be an early causalty of peak oil.
Then again it did not surprise me to hear of another strange logistic. After all, every day I see coal barges going down the Ohio river from West Virginia passing barges going up river with coal from Wyoming (via Iowa) to West Virginia.
That is no nonsense - I have a friend who's father works for an aggregates company in outstate Nebraska. They're putting a certain grade of sand into semis going all over the place. They've got some stuff that is the right size/weight/whatever and they're putting 90% of their energy into that because demand is so high right now.
Here in Sonoma county (CA) we've just had a fair mixup about sand. It seems that fom umpteen years the concrete companies have been mining the Russian river. I guess they got too close to some vineyards and had to stop. We now import sand from, I think, Oregon.