Broberg LTE: digging up hills for frac sand way better than using fertilizer made from natural gas

Bluestem has been concerned about both frac sand mining and nitrogen pollution, so when we read industrial sand mining consultant Jeffery S. Broberg's guest column in the Winona Daily News, On water quality -- hold farmers to the same standard as frac sand miners, we snorted our coffee out of our nose the other morning.

It's not that we don't want to hold both industrial sand and industrial agri-business to high standards, since both extractive industries damage soil and water.

The irony is that Broberg--who once claimed at a public meeting that the would-be sand miners he represents had "a higher level of rights" than ordinary citizens speaking out--fails to connect the dots between the industries.

Natural gas is a key ingredient in the production of nitrogen fertilizer, and as fracking has brought on low prices and abundant supplies for domestic natural gas, shuttered American fertilizer plants are reopening while new plants are planned.

Broberg's argument

In On water quality -- hold farmers to the same standard as frac sand miners, the LCCMR member and McGhie and Betts vice-president writes:

. . . The sand industry recognizes the importance of our water resources and our trout streams and the sand industry's participation in developing the new regulation is an example of willing water stewardship -- a value that I personally wish was shared by local agricultural interests who locally plow to within 10 feet of the streams, produce massive erosion that continues to choke our watersheds and apply nutrients and other polluting chemicals at ever greater rates, willfully impairing and degrading our waters and our trout stream.

Last week when I read the current MPCA study on nitrogen pollution (http://www.pca.state.mn.us/index.php/view-document.html?gid=1962) that reported that, on average, 73 percent of nitrogen pollution comes from farms, that farmers annually loose 211 million pounds of nitrogen down the Mississippi River, and nitrogen leaching out of groundwater into surface water accounts for 30 percent of the total nitrogen loss. It is clear that farming needs to come to the table to prevent and solve the problems of water pollution, just like sand mines have pledged to do.

I am happy to work with the sand miners who take water resource issues so seriously and are engaged in protecting this critical and life-sustaining resource -- even when totally surrounded by row crops and even when they are harangued by wayward and ill-informed Soil and Water Conservation Districts and state agencies who are syncopates for production agriculture, but, who care little, and do even less, to actually protect or enhance our groundwater, surface water or our trout streams from agriculture. I'm hopeful that the public will begin to see that if we want to protect our water, and protect or enhance our trout streams, we are better off with responsible sand mining than we are with the intractable resistance of farmers who say that they "care for the land" but truly neglect, and continue to degrade our water.

In my opinion farming should follow the example of mining and seek a fact based, scientific and technical analysis for the impact of farming within one-mile of all trout streams, wetlands and groundwater recharge areas, including all karst areas with less than 50 feet of soil. . . .

The use of "willing" to describe the sand industry is laughable, for those of use who attended the hearings on proposals to regulate silica sand mining in Minnesota heard industry witness after witness testify that, no sir, they were regulated enough and gosh darn jobs it, sure didn't need anyone else poking their noses into their business.

In short, the industry was dragged kicking and screaming into the late session compromise by massive citizen opposition to the removal of a working landscape.

Now one industry representative is claiming that those citizens would be better off with sand miners working the land than farmers using one of the end-products of frac sand mining. It's like reading a flack for the shackle industry condemn the use of chain gangs.

Cheap gas revives domestic fertilizer production

Before domestic fracking caused natural gas prices to plummet, much nitrogen fertilizer production had shifted off shore, Scientific American reported in Fertilizer Plants Spring Up to Take Advantage of U.S.’s Cheap Natural Gas:

The devastating explosion at a fertilizer-blending facility in West, Texas, on April 17 called attention to the risks of ammonia-based fertilizer production and storage. Between 1984 and 2006, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration reported 224 accidents, resulting in 50 fatalities, at ammonia plants around the U.S., and ammonia-based fertilizers and explosives were involved in a variety of intentional attacks, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Now, a different kind of boom in the fertilizer business—no explosives required—could also spell trouble.

No ammonia plants—which produce 90 percent of the fertilizer used worldwide—have broken ground in the U.S. in more than 20 years. But in the next three to five years, that’s changing. Today there are as many as 14 ammonia plants proposed in the U.S., with nearly 12 million tons of new capacity and $10 billion of expected investment. Several older plants are also being recommissioned and upgraded. Louisiana, Iowa, North Dakota, Texas and Indiana are among the proposed sites. This boom, driven by low prices for natural gas—the main ingredient in ammonia production—will drive a corresponding surge in the industry’s already substantial carbon footprint.

That plant in North Dakota? The Forum Communications' Kevin Bonham reported in Corn growers plan $1.5 billion fertilizer plant near Grand Forks:

North Dakota corn growers are planning a $1 billion nitrogen fertilizer manufacturing plant to be built near here in rural Grand Forks County.
Gov. Jack Dalrymple and Grand Forks Mayor Mike Brown will make a formal announcement today.

The plant will produce nitrogen fertilizer by converting gas currently being flared from oil wells in western North Dakota, according to Tom Lilja, president of the North Dakota Corn Growers Association. Other details will be released during today’s news conference.

The facility, which has been estimated to cost between $1 billion and

$1.5 billion, could supply fertilizer for up to 12 percent of corn and wheat acreage in North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota, Lilja said last summer, when the group initially announced plans to build a plant somewhere in North Dakota.

The plant will address two problems, according to the corn growers: It would use the natural gas that now is largely flared off – or wasted – in western North Dakota, while providing farmers in the region with a guaranteed supply of fertilizer without relying on imports. . . .

The group plans to market and distribute nitrogen fertilizer and other commercial products to farmers and industries in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Montana, as well as Manitoba and Saskatch-ewan, according to a grant application to the North Dakota Agricultural Products Utilization Commission.

And the North Dakota Corn Growers aren't the only ones building a plant, Bonham notes at the end of the article:

CHS Inc., working with North Dakota Farmers Union, is also planning to build $1.4 billion nitrogen fertilizer plant in Spiritwood, N.D., also using flared gas from oil production.

Rather than the false dicotomy that Broberg sets up, industrial mining and industrial farming are part of the same supply change. Indeed, both industries spend an inordinate amount of time pissing and moaning about regulation. Broberg may kvetch about the unfairness of regulation in this piece, but the frac sand mining industry facilitates nitrogen fertilizer production. Once those fertilizer plants are built in North Dakota, the sand coming out of the driftless region will be used to frack shale oil, and the flared gas that's a by-product will create the fertilizer Broberg loathes.

Not that he's telling readers that.

Permits and repeated violations

Broberg contends that permitting will protect Minnesota's waters from potential risks, but Wisconsin's experience--sometimes with the same companies operating processing facilities in Minnesota like Tiller and Preferred Sands--suggests another scenerio.

Across the river in LaCrosse, the Daily New's sister Lee Media publication reports in DNR: Sand mines violated stormwater permits:

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources says four Trempealeau County frac sand facilities violated stormwater permits when they allowed sand to run into nearby streams and wetlands.

The DNR is still investigating the extent of the environmental damage. If it’s extensive, the mines could have to pay for the streams to be repaired.

Sediment spills can damage plant and fish habitats because the sand gets in the way of microorganisms, kills aquatic plants and creates algae blooms that remove oxygen from the water.

The mines’ stormwater ponds gave away in late May after a heavy rainfall filled them with excess water and sand, said Roberta Walls, a DNR stormwater management specialist. The sediment left in the pond entered the streams and the wetlands when the ponds flooded. . . .

That's Wisconsin, but the multiple violations suggest that unlike St. Genevieve, permits can't hold back the water.

Saturday, the Star Tribune's point reporter on the industrial sand industry Tony Kennedy reported in Pollution worries abound in frac sand waste streams:

In Wisconsin, frac-sand mines in Trempealeau, Buffalo and Barron counties are creating unstable piles of sand waste and illicit wastewater runoff.

In Minnesota, state health officials are studying two chemicals widely used in frac-sand processing as contaminants of “emerging concern.”

Four years into a mining boom that is reshaping parts of the rural countryside, mining companies and government regulators are coming to grips with the reality that the new industry involves much more than scooping sand out of the ground and hauling it away. . . .

From pyramids of discarded sand to sludge that accumulates in filtering devices, the mines create tons of waste byproducts that must be managed until they can be plowed back into the ground as part of reclamation plans designed to protect the environment and preserve the rural landscape.

“The industry just came on too fast,” said Ruth King, a stormwater specialist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. “I wish we could turn back the clock a couple of years and start over.”

In a rash of continuing violations that started last year, heavy rains have combined with sand-processing water to overflow holding ponds on several mining sites. The breaches have dumped sandy sediment into public waters, where it can suffocate fish eggs, kill aquatic plants and rob fish of habitat they need to reproduce. . . .

Read the entire article at the Strib.

Rethinking mining and extractive agriculture

Broberg does have a point about fertilizer use by farmers, and while Minnesota's devastating study of nitrogen pollution is a well-documented science-based wake-up call.

However, Broberg calls for increased regulation for farmers, because--one supposes--Minnesota's brand spanking new state water permitting system for mining will work so well. Just look at Wisconsin.

But a larger look at nitrogen fertilizer by Grist magazine several years ago--before the price of natural gas plummeted and domestic fertilizer production started up again, suggests that rethinking farming practices--just like rethinking fossil-fuel based energy--might be a more promising solution than regulating the industries, however willing or unwilling they are.

The magazine's multipart series, The N2 Dilemma: Is America Fertilizing Disaster? is worth a read, as the consequences of the practice remain, wherever the fertilizer is manufactured. Rather than the rhetorical game Broberg plays, the series' introduction suggests there's much harder work to be done:

In this special Grist series, we’ll be looking at where synthetic nitrogen comes from and what our reliance on it is doing to our health and to the health of our waterways and climate. We’ll also be looking at ways in which synthetic nitrogen can be used more wisely — and, as much as possible, phased out.

The question of where our food comes from will take us on a journey from the farm out to the fertilizer factory — and even farther, to the globe’s finite [sic] and far-flung natural gas deposits. And more important than where synthetic nitrogen comes from is where it will take us.

As with anything fueling a system that feeds a nation of 300 million, there are no easy answers to the nitrogen dilemma. But we will pose the hard questions — and try to generate debate about a critical ecological issue that remains obscure and little-discussed.

Frac sand mining isn't a paradigm to be held up while demonizing farmers. Rather, it's part of the industrial base that faciliates industrial agri-business. It is, as one blogger writes, The Gas We Eat.

Photo: Ammonia tanks (above); Sand mining industry apologist Jeff Broberg (below).

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