Energy Entrepreneurs Market Sand Alternative To Fracking Companies

• Scott Detrow
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
  
  Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.
  
  Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

FuelFix takes a look at the latest group of businesses trying to make money off of the domestic shale drilling boom: companies producing ceramic beads that can be used instead of sand in hydraulic fracturing mixes.
Sand plays an important role in the fracking process: the grains help maintain the cracks in the shale rock that the drillers create by blasting chemical-laden fluid deep underground.
Fracking’s rise has made sand much more valuable, but health administrators have also warned that rig workers are putting themselves at risk, if they come into contact with too much of it on drilling sites.
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Most drillers still use sand, especially in shallow or low-pressure wells. But a growing number of companies have formed to produce tiny ceramic beads, known as ceramic proppant, for use in the wells, based on research showing the beads can penetrate farther into the rock and hold up better under pressure, increasing the productivity of wells.
Count Gary Davis, a real estate developer and investor from Austin, as among the new evangelists for ceramic proppant.
Davis and a group of investors bought 400 acres in West Central Texas and set out to prove that the beads, traditionally made from specialized types of clay found in only a few parts of the world, could instead be made from clay found almost anywhere.
Another company, Oxane Materials, is hoping the advantages of its product, developed in a lab at Rice University using nanotechnology, will outweigh its higher cost.

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